


grief makes a poor companion

by ncfan



Series: Legendarium Ladies April [39]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Background Finarfin/Earwen, Bechdel Test Pass, First Age, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, POV Female Character, Trauma, Tumblr: legendariumladiesapril, and background implied Earwen/Anaire, not enough to get tags
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:34:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24031348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: When Eärwen read the pamphlet, when she saw what Anairë had written, she knew she should have been more worried sooner, knew she should have come back sooner. But she could not change the past, only contend with the present and try to pave a path to the future that she would actually like to walk down.
Relationships: Anairë & Eärwen (Tolkien)
Series: Legendarium Ladies April [39]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/244393
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13
Collections: Legendarium Ladies April 2020





	grief makes a poor companion

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the April 9, 2014 [poetry prompt](https://legendariumladiesapril.tumblr.com/post/82180909336/legendarium-ladies-april-prompts-for-april-9), _A Conceit_. The full text of the poem is in the endnote.

The house was dark when Eärwen approached it, and there were no evening shadows—and the very concept of _evening_ in Tirion, when the shadows that city had known had never come from anything but the shadows cast by the mountains in the dazzling light of the Trees, cut through Eärwen’s memories with a jarring, grating wrongness. Perpetual twilight had been for her own lands, and night in its fullness had been for the distant shores where she had been born. When they had come here, Eärwen had yet been a small child, but she remembered the greatest of those promises Ulmo had made them: if they went to the Blessed Realm, they would never know true darkness again, and they would never again know the terrors that stalked from the edges of the shadows of true darkness, the fiends that lurked beyond the meager lights cast by their bonfires.

This was what they had promised, and for years upon years, the promise had been fulfilled. The Lindar had lingered upon the twilit shores, for they loved the stars too dearly to go anywhere they would have to forsake them, but there was light shining through the cleft in the mountains, gold and silver light that never ceased. The Lindar had lingered upon the shores of the Sea, loving both the stars and the water, loving the Maiar who yet visited them there with such frequency. They had had the twilight, but with none of the danger that came with true darkness, for there was light shining through the cleft in the mountains, and all they need do was travel west to be in the light, to be bathed by ineffable radiance and know that in that radiance, there was true, unshakeable safety.

Until, one day, that light failed, and the starlight failed with it, and the Lindar were drowned in a darkness more profound than any they had ever before known, a darkness more profound than the darkness on the sandy beds of the sea. It was a darkness with form and with weight, a darkness fit that threw the Lindar down on the sand and pinned them there like butterflies to a display case in one of the museums in Tirion—there were some who could even feel the terror-sharpness of fine-tipped points skewering their flesh.

Or so it had been told to her. Eärwen had not been there. She had felt that darkness, but she had not been there, had not been one of the ones crushed against the sand. Her mother had told her of what it had been like, later, and she would tell it to her in such a way that, though Eärwen had been in Valmar, had been far from the shores of the Sea when darkness crushed the land in its grip, she woke at times with the feeling of grit sticking to her cheek, to the feeling of fine points piercing her flesh, to the terrible silence of true, utter darkness, her lying on the shores of the Sea and yet completely deaf to the voices of the waters and the tides and the dissonance of tons of brine crashing against boulders.

That silence, at least, was easy to envision. It had been silent in Valmar as well when the darkness came, all cries of terror drowned in fathomless, impenetrable black. Drowning in it, Eärwen had been unable to move, barely able to breathe, her ribcage creaking with each gasp she sucked in, and all she could do was cast her eyes about, searching frantically for any break in the dark, any sign of light.

She was alone. She could not call for her husband, or their children, or any others who might happen to be there. She could not even scream without words. The darkness had gotten into her mouth and clamped down on her tongue.

Darkness was something they all had to live with now, even in the Blessed Realm. No more was this a land of eternal light, where the only shadows to be found were the ones cast by the structures around them, and even by the shores of the sea, there was light pouring in through the cleft in the mountains. Eärwen had been born into a land of starlight—and otherwise, a darkness that could be weakened only by short-lived fires. She did not relish returning to a time where darkness, true darkness, was theirs, even if only for part of the day. She did not relish it, but she thought that she could live with it.

She had been a child when her father’s people had left Endóre behind them, but she had _lived_ in darkness, for a time. She had lived in darkness, and she could return to it. Let them light fires to weaken the grip of night, let them light candles to make merry a house that would otherwise have been gloomy and full of shadows. Eärwen could no longer look at the Blessed Realm with fully innocent eyes, could no longer look at this land and make herself believe that no dangers would ever touch it, but she knew how to make light of the night. Give the night colored lanterns, give the night song, give it dancing, give it stories and bells and love and merriment, and the night was not tamed, not exactly, but it was no longer quite the stranger it had been.

Darkness was something Eärwen would have to live with, now. She was going to live with it, and more than that, she was going to make it something that would have to live with her, as well. She was so far from being the ultimate power in this land, but she knew what she did have power over.

Among other things, Eärwen had power over whether she felt her heart was ready for her to return to Tirion, after everything that had happened. She had returned, after years upon years of refusing to set foot from the confines of her father’s lands. She had not returned with joy, though Arafinwë had attempted to receive her with such, only pausing and falling back away from her when she greeted his attempt at an embrace with a long, empty stare. And that stare was empty because of all the things she was feeling when she saw him again, of all the oceans of emotions that swelled up inside of her at the sight of sunlight washing his flaxen hair an almost incandescent gold, the sight of the light making radiant his fair face, Eärwen could not decide which emotion she wished most to feel. She couldn’t even sort those emotions out from each other, could not pick the knots loose and tidy; she _certainly_ couldn’t decide which tangled emotion to express.

If she had tried, Eärwen suspected that, as is the nature of a tangle, she would have lost track of the emotion at some point and switched directly to another. As her emotions were so confused, so too would her expression of them had been. And that had been weeks ago, and Eärwen was yet finding herself forced to choose to feel nothing, for the intensity of the confusion of her thoughts and emotions.

Tirion had never been her permanent home. Even in the early days of their love, when heady passion had yet to steady itself into the constant welcoming warmth of affection, Arafinwë had not expected her to spend all of her time in a city so far from the home she so loved. Indeed, when Eärwen made years-long sojourns in Alqualondë, Arafinwë had often gone with her, or else he had followed hastily after her when the familial unrest became more than he could tolerate. Most of their children had been born in Alqualondë; only Artaresto and Artanis had been born in Tirion, and this because by the time Eärwen had found herself longing for the shores once more, her pregnancies were too advanced to make the journey to Alqualondë anything short of miserable.

Tirion had never been Eärwen’s permanent home, and she had not thought of it as home in the way that Indis had. She _certainly_ had not thought of it as home in the way Findis or Lalwen or Nerdanel had. And Anairë…

Anairë, Eärwen thought, might have felt something of the same way that Eärwen had, for Anairë had made myriad trips to and from Valmar over the course of her life, though Arafinwë told her that those trips had stopped after—

Anairë was a tangle unto herself, and though she was one Eärwen intended to begin disentangling soon, very soon, one thing at a time. The best way to sort out all that confused you, all that put your mind in disorder, was to take it all one thing at a time. Eärwen was not in such a situation as to require multi-tasking. Though she could never again be entirely certain of the safety of the Blessed Realm, her rational mind told her that she was not in any immediate peril. The Ainur kept close watch over largely-depopulated Tirion. Part of it was for the safety of the Aulendur, Eärwen was sure, for in this uncertain new world where _murder_ was a word that must now be part of the vernacular, who could say that the innocent would not be slain here, in retaliation for a time when other innocents had been slain?

(The sand had still been red when she went home. She had slid from her horse’s back, and blood bubbled up from the wet sand as her feet hit the ground, dribbling onto her feet, filling her nose with its copper reek. She had retched multiple times before she finally escaped the pervasive odor within the confines of the city, but it had returned to her at odd hours. She would be eating with her parents and her brothers, and as she lifted a spoonful of soup to her lips, where she should have tasted broth she would instead catch the acrid taste of copper, and she would retch so violently her mother would rush to her and her father would call for a physician. She would be bathing and her bathwater would suddenly seem red. She would be trying to sleep in the bed that had been hers since the early days of her adulthood, and as Eärwen pressed the side of her face into the pillow, where she had expected the clean, delicate scent of the soap the servants used to clean her bed linens, she was instead assailed with that heavy, inescapable rust-smell of blood.)

Part of the Ainur’s watch over Tirion was undoubtedly for the safety and well-being of the Aulendur, those few who were left in Tirion after the Exiles had left it so far behind them. But Eärwen knew that there was something else to it. Even if the Ainur had never given _any_ reason for why Tirion was now so watched, she knew that the Valar had considered it a hotbed of dissidence for many years before the murder of the Trees and the brief reign of darkness over the Blessed Realm. That wasn’t a secret; even those who lived in the far southern reaches of the continent and came up north to the major cities every three hundred years or so (at most), knew what the Valar thought of the Ñoldor in the days of the Unrest. Though the Aulendur had remained true to the Valar, had remained—for the most part—committed to the peace of the Blessed Realm, that did not mean that they were fully absolved of the Valar’s watchful caution. Eärwen suspected it would be a long time yet before the Aulendur were considered entirely beyond the need to be watched.

And Eärwen was not certain when _she_ would be able to shake the feeling that Tirion needed to be put under the watch of something strong enough to prevent any Ellalië-manufactured calamity. She knew it to be unfair to the Aulendur, and for that reason, if no other, she was yet endeavoring to remember that the Aulendur had remained loyal, the Aulendur had been true, the Aulendur had not fomented dissent, and the Aulendur had not spilled blood in this sacred land.

None of the Ñoldor Eärwen might pass on the street, what few Ñoldor Eärwen might pass on the street, had the blood of her kin crusted deep in the lines of their hands. She tried to remember that. Sometimes, she was trying to remember it with all the strength her mind could put forth, and still found herself forgetting for several moments on end. Then, what she expected was for the flagstones to shift beneath her feet, for something to bubble up between the cracks between the flagstones every time she put her weight on the stone, for that something to be dark, and viscous, and for it to reek of copper so strongly that she would be able to smell nothing else, not until she came down off of the hill and put Tirion far behind her and never, ever looked back.

She had so much yet to untangle, and in the meantime, she worked to be pleasantly expressionless and emotionless when she must show her face to Arafinwë’s people. She worked to be pleasantly expressionless and emotionless when she must show her face to Arafinwë, and wondered in the meantime when he would finally show his temper (she knew how deeply buried it was, but she _knew_ him, and she knew that even if he was much milder of temperament than either of his brothers, and frankly of his sisters as well—Findis might be even-tempered, but she was _intense_ , and that made her even-temperedness something entirely different from her youngest brother’s) and demand to know why she had even bothered to return, if she was going to hold herself so aloof.

She was waiting for confrontation. She was _hoping_ for confrontation. Eärwen did not know why she hoped for it, when she found herself dreading the confrontation as much as she hoped for it. What she did know was that her husband’s meek agreeableness towards her grated on her, though it also, paradoxically, felt slippery and daunting, like trying to climb up a perfectly smooth cliff, where you could find purchase nowhere and could only stare at the cliff in frustration, for you needed to get up the side and the geography would not cooperate with you, no matter how you screamed at it.

Once, she had admired in Arafinwë the sheer amount of control he had over his temper. Once, she had been a woman who had married into what was easily the most tempestuous family in all of the Blessed Realm (the Valar did not qualify, or the very simple reason that if Eärwen allowed the Valar to qualify, Moringotto would, all by himself, leave every family of the Ellalië beat for all time), and she had counted herself happy that her husband, though he was not entirely without a temper, possessed a temper considerably milder than that of his brothers or sisters, and that, most crucially, knew better than Lalwen or Ñolofinwë or Findis or _especially_ Fëanáro how to properly control and contain his temper. Eärwen, an outsider who was inclined to an easy, optimistic nature, and Arafinwë, who was not inclined to his siblings’ dramatics (well, Findis was not exactly dramatic—but then, her intensity was not exactly _unobtrusive_ , either), were able to stand at least somewhat apart from the rest and watch them with a mixture of bemusement and unimpressed boredom. Whenever whatever function they were stuck in was over with and they could escape the atmosphere of tension, which shifted to concealed hostility, which over the years shifted to increasingly poorly-concealed hostility, nothing that had swirled around them would follow them outside. So far from the Sea, Eärwen was happiest besides fountains, and sometimes, if there was no chance that there was anyone around who would either scold Arafinwë later for the lack of propriety, or could carry whispers back to _others_ who would be wont to scold over perceived (it was an over-reaction, and Eärwen would never stop thinking of it in such terms) breaches of propriety, they would strip off most of their clothes and swim. It was not the same; there was no true current in the fountains, and Eärwen could not dive down very far at all before her fingertips were brushing the tiled floor of the fountains, but the glimmering jade and lapis tiles put her in mind of the Sea, all the same, and while it might not erase the ever-present ache in her heart, it was a balm upon her, nonetheless.

For however long it lasted.

But as the Unrest congealed and time sped on towards the seemingly inevitable moment of calamity, Eärwen’s happiness in her husband soured around the edges, as all joys had soured around the edges.

And now, _now_ , he was just another tangle for her to unravel. One among many. And Eärwen had no idea how it was that she would disentangle her emotions, how the currents would ever flow smooth and true again.

Eärwen stared at the dark house, which gathered shadows even at noontide, with Anar hanging directly overhead—a pale shadow of Culúrien’s radiance, certainly, but it was what they had, and what they would have to live with. She watched for any sign of movement in the windows, any lighting of a candle, any rustling of the curtains. The curtains looked thicker than the ones Eärwen had been used to, in times of Treelight and an unrest that had not yet shattered into calamity.

She waited for the curtains to part, and a pale face to appear in the windows.

The moment never came, and Eärwen eventually had to go on her way, and leave the house to its shadows, and the currents of darkness that might yet be embedded in the walls inside. The moment was not yet ripe.

-0-0-0-

Eärwen met Anairë long before the two women could consider themselves sisters by marriage. It was not long after she had met Arafinwë, actually, when Arafinwë was yet a coltish boy who horsed around with her brothers and looked up into her face with the sort of wide-eyed silence Eärwen would have thought more appropriate for someone looking into the face of Uinen for the first time (though Eärwen had had Uinen for a playmate as a little girl, and thus, she had never quite felt or understood the awe the younger Ellalië expressed when they met her) than for Eärwen, even if Eärwen was the daughter of Olwë. Then, Eärwen had thought of Arafinwë much in the same way as she thought of her brothers, and it had only been later, when he had been away for many years and returned a gentle, measured young man whose gaze still lingered upon her, but had lost the awe and gained something it took her a long while to name, when she began to think of him in another way, entirely, though it would be long before she knew it for what it was.

But that is a story for another time, and it would be long in the telling. There is another one that is meant to be told, and it goes off down a different path, though it does not stray too far.

So. Eärwen had gone with her father to Tirion to meet with Finwë, leaving her mother and brothers behind in Alqualondë. It had not been the first time Eärwen had met Finwë, of course. The king of the Ñoldor was an old, old friend of her father’s, as old a friend as it was possible to be, and Finwë had made the trip down to Alqualondë many times; Finwë had even made the voyage over the water to Tol Eressëa a time or two, though Eärwen was never certain as to why. But this was the first time Eärwen had gone to Tirion, and thus, the whole experience was stamped quite firmly in her mind.

To be blunt, she had not cared for Tirion, not at first. There would come a later time when Eärwen would learn to appreciate the city’s beauty, its _vitality_ , though it was a beauty and a vitality so different to what pulsed in the foundations of Alqualondë. But for now, it was a place where Eärwen could not smell the Sea, could not smell that smell that could not be salt or water, for neither of those things had any true scent, but which she associated with salt and water, anyways. From the hill of Túna, Eärwen could not smell the sea, and thus, Tirion was completely disqualified as anywhere she thought it might be pleasant to live.

(And in truth, that disqualification would never lift in full. She had married a man who was tied to Tirion in ways that could never be severed, and she had lived with him for a time because, even though he grew less and less fond of that city to which he was bound as time dragged on and found more excuses to be away from it, he was still bound. Eärwen had lived with Arafinwë in Tirion from time to time to avoid making him ridiculous—though Fëanáro was determined to make him ridiculous anyhow, in ways that Eärwen had a hard time forgiving, even knowing that he was dead and ashen and consigned to the Houses of the Dead until the breaking of the world. Fëanáro had been determined to make the youngest of his siblings ridiculous, because he did not understand him, and whatever Fëanáro’s bright, radiant mind could not comprehend _must_ be ridiculous, because only the ridiculous was beneath his comprehension.

Fëanáro was brilliant, but he was also rigid, and Eärwen had had much time to become acquainted with his seemingly endless capacity for petty maliciousness and foolishness. If it had been directed at anyone else, she thought she could have overlooked it, if with poor grace—and she had done, many times. But when he turned that likely endless capacity upon Arafinwë—well, the first time she _watched_ him turn it on Arafinwë—that was something she did not think the breaking of the world would give her the capacity to forgive.)

At the time, Eärwen had yet to find anything about Tirion she could profess to love enough to dwell upon it. And even when later affection would find her on the neat, orderly streets, there would never accompany it any fascination. But that was later, far later, and she had no affection for it, and thus was _profoundly_ bored.

Her father was in a meeting with Finwë, and Queen Indis was on a trip to Valmar on which her children had accompanied her, and Fëanáro was… _somewhere_. Eärwen was at loose ends, in a land where it had yet to occur to anyone that any true danger could ever befall someone who wandered a city alone. This was a time long before a man would ever confront his brother with a sword in hand. This was a time before a man would ever be slain on the steps of his house. Eärwen never imagined that any danger could befall her here, for while she had been born to Endóre, she had matured in the Blessed Realm, and she had grown accustomed to a life where there was no danger in wandering out from under the watchful eyes of her family. She thought nothing of wandering the streets of Tirion, trying to find anything that might divert her in a city she could not see anything about she could like.

The Mingling of the Lights had begun by the time she found the fountain. Tirion was thick with fountains, for both the Ñoldor and the Vaniai loved the sound of flowing water (not as much as the Lindar, but it was in the hearts of all Ellalië to love water, for it was by water that they had first awoken), and being far from the sea and not close to any river that flowed in the Blessed Realm, they had gotten creative, and made some flowing water of their own. The Ñoldor, after all, were renowned for their craftiness. Of course, if they wanted the sound of flowing water, they would find a way to get it.

There were a multitude of fountains in Tirion, large and small, and this was not one of the small ones. The fountain was a shallow one, but it was _massive_ , stretching so far across that Eärwen thought that, if someone with the strength for it came along, they could have easily have dropped one of the larger houses in Tirion into the fountain, and the walls of the house would have been fully encompassed by the low, white-washed walls of the pool. Granted, the fountain itself, tall and proud in the center and fashioned into a cluster of riotous stone flowers, might have presented some trouble with that, but take it away, and, indeed, the house would have fit comfortably.

Naturally, Eärwen liked this fountain, even if she liked rather less the fact that the water smelled nothing like the Sea. The flowers from which the water spouted were sculpted to look like, well Eärwen did not know what they were sculpted to look like. Others were fascinated by flowers and studied books to learn what each and every one was called; Eärwen reserved such devotion for fish and anemones and urchins and what shells washed up on the soft, yielding sand of the beach. The flowers were ostentatious, showy blooms, petals an almost lurid purple, though they were painted a more delicate pink as the flesh—was that the right word?—of the petals inched towards the center of the bloom, and all over, the flowers were speckled, intentionally, Eärwen thought, with white, which softened the image considerably. They were beautiful. Eärwen had never paid very much attention to flowers, but she could recognize a beautiful thing when she saw it. They were so finely carved that she could almost believe that if she stepped into the pool and drew close enough, she would be able to pick up on their scent.

That was impossible, of course. As Eärwen drew closer, she could see the white of the stone where deep green stems of these flowers met the floor of the pool. Still, whoever had carved them, whoever had painted them, had done undeniably fine work. She could admire them, even if her heart was a little disappointed by the lack of what would undoubtedly have been a heavy, musky scent.

She was probably alone in coming to this fountain to admire the carved flowers. It was a warm night, and many of the people of the city had decided to take to the fountain to cool themselves. Later, much later, Eärwen would learn that she was not alone in wishing that there was a source of natural water for swimming in closer to Tirion, and that fountains had to be specifically classified as being for drinking or for decoration to keep the Ñoldor from wading or, in the case of the deep ones, from swimming in them. But for now, she looked at the adults and children milling about in the pool with something closer to shock than enjoyment. This was not a side of these people that she had seen before. She found it reassuring, certainly, but she had _not_ expected it.

Eärwen spent so long admiring the carven flowers, so long gawking at the people who had stripped down to clothing closest to the skin to frolic in the waters, that it took her a while to notice the slender shadow sitting on the lip of the pool on the far side of the fountain, away from all the others.

But when Eärwen noticed her, the woman—it was a woman, she confirmed with herself, when she drew a little closer—her curiosity obliged her to walk over to where the woman was sitting.

The woman’s hair was long and brown and bound in a loose braid which framed a thin, pale face. Where the other people here had indeed stripped down to the clothing right next to their skin, she wore a long-sleeved dress of deep blue, pocked with gold and silver beads plainly meant to simulate stars and bound at the waist with a white satin sash, the image of swooping birds just barely embossed into them, the tails of which brushed against the ground. She was slight, and did not seem very tall, a suspicion of Eärwen’s that was confirmed when she first saw the woman stand and saw that she was many inches shorter than Eärwen herself.

The woman did not look up as Eärwen approached, and Eärwen soon discovered the reason. The woman was poring over a sheet of parchment, stylus in hand, inkwell sitting on the lip of the pool at her side.

Well, the inkwell _was_ sitting on the lip of the pool at her side, until an especially clumsy child just sort of… _happened_.

“Hey!” the woman cried out indignantly, as a little girl came too close to the edge and, in an attempt to grab on to that edge, knocked the inkwell right into the water.

The little girl, for her part, rapidly swam away ( _very_ little, then, to be able to swim in such a shallow pool) when she realized what she’d done, leaving the woman to fume helplessly as she watched clouds of ink appear in the water, spilling out of her inkwell, unusable and irretrievable.

To Eärwen, it looked rather like an octopus had just been nearby, and had expressed its displeasure at being approached by a predator or by the sight of a person’s feet. Profoundly. The sight made her think of the Sea, and filled her with an aching fondness that she was not certain she could place, but then a breeze swept through the square and it carried her the scent of absolutely nothing at all, and she put the fondness away. This was not the water that had been hers. Water that was tamed and held in the confines of a pool was something entirely different.

And she shouldn’t just be gawking at someone’s distress like a voyeur, either.

The woman was staring down into the water, helpless fury painting her pale features a flushed pink as she watched the lid of her inkwell flap gently open and shut in the water. The pool was a shallow one, but it was just deep enough that the woman seemed to be uncertain if she could roll her admittedly rather loose sleeve high up enough on her arm to avoid getting it wet or stained with water-diluted ink.

Eärwen, on the other hand, was not wearing any sleeves.

“Is this yours?” she asked cheerfully, and though the question was rather pointless, she hoped it had at least served a purpose. Beads of water dripped from her arm as she held the sopping wet inkwell out to the woman, careful, after watching the way the woman had rolled up her sleeve to avoid wetting her clothes, not to hold it out so close to her that any droplets of water, barely colored by ink now, but still, would drip onto the front of her dress. “It’s a pretty inkwell; it would be a shame to lose it.”

It _was_ a pretty inkwell. As Eärwen would learn later, Anairë was quite particular about her writing materials, and this very much extended to her inkwells. Many of the most objectively beautiful things to be found in the Blessed Realm (Eärwen’s affection for the Sea and the shore was apparently not what most outside of Alqualondë would consider _objective_ ) were to be found in Valmar and in the cities of the Vaniai, but for writing materials, the Ñoldor topped all. This one was yet plain compared to the inkwells Anairë would take as her own later in life, when she was the wife of a prince and the mother of his children, but this one was indeed a pretty inkwell in its own right, a delicately constructed receptacle made of alabaster and set around the edges with thin bands of scarlet jasper. It was an elegant construction, but stark. This, too, Eärwen would come to find characteristic, not just of Anairë’s belongings, but of the woman herself.

“I certainly think so,” the woman was saying in this moment. She did not smile as she held out her hand for the inkwell, but there was a softening to the intensity of her expression that, even with her features made faintly indistinct by the mingled gold and silver light that suffused them all, Eärwen could not fail to notice. “I think the keepers of the fountain would have thought it a shame as well, once it found its way down into the pipes. I…” Her fingers closed shut over the inkwell, and she stared down at her closed hand, rather than up into Eärwen’s face. “Thank you,” she murmured.

Eärwen could not help but smile; it was the effect that being thanked for anything had ever had for her, that small spark of pleasure somewhere in her mind that had never been excised, that it would be a long time yet before she would understand why there would ever be a need or want to excise it. “I am certain that anyone else would have done the same, in my place,” she demurred. “But if you really want to thank me,” she added, with another smile, “please, what is your name?”

And now, now, a thin, cool smile was breaking over the woman’s delicate mouth. Not the coolness of wintry cold in the mind, but the coolness of the dew on the grass in the early days of spring, something that carried both the memory of winter and the promise of summer. It was an expression, Eärwen thought, that well matched her eyes, which were the pale blue of the sky at the edges of the light that poured in through the cleft of the mountains, when Eärwen was outside of that cleft, peering inside. “Anairë. And you?”

‘Anairë.’ Eärwen let the syllables rest in her mouth. The name had something of the Vaniai to it, and when she stopped to think of it for a moment, it was not so surprising. The Ñoldor and the Vaniai had lived together in this city a long time, and…

It should not have been a surprise. The kindreds of the Ellalië were hardly held separate from each other, their paths never allowed to cross, their lives never allowed to intertwine. It should not have been a surprise, and so, Eärwen did not allow it to throw her for very long. “My name is Eärwen,” she replied. “I am recently come to Tirion for the first time, and I thought to look around.” She would leave out that she had yet to find anything that could hope to equal Alqualondë. “I suppose it is good for your inkwell that I did.”

“ _Eärwen,_ ” Eärwen heard Anairë muttering to herself, the audible equivalent of Eärwen’s letting the syllables of Anairë’s name linger in her mouth.

Eärwen watched, patiently, as Anairë visibly strove to piece together where she had heard the name before. It was just a little bemusing. Eärwen and Olwë had arrived in Tirion with considerably less fanfare than they could have, but Eärwen knew that there must have been announcements made. There were always announcements made when kings traveled anywhere in the Blessed Realm, for there was no danger to other people being able to track the movements of kings, and in the Blessed Realm, it had been decided that there were certain ceremonies that should accompany the movements of kings. Eärwen found it all just a little unnecessary, but it wasn’t enough of an inconvenience for her to say anything about it, not really.

The movements of kings were accompanied by announcements and other ceremonies, and as Eärwen was traveling with her father in this instance, her name would have been included in those announcements. The announcements that, she knew, every current resident of Tirion would have been made privy to.

But this Anairë might well have been too wrapped up in whatever she was writing to hear. Eärwen would expect no less of a Ñoldo, even one with the blood of the Vaniai most likely wrapped up in her veins.

At last, comprehension dawned, and color flooded into Anairë’s face, so fast and so thick that Eärwen almost expected to see droplets of blood blooming on her skin. “Eärwen? _Princess_ Eärwen?”

Hands still clutching her parchment and her stylus, Anairë scrambled to her feet, all composure forgotten—this, too, would become something Eärwen knew so well about her, how brittle her composure was, how easily broken, how what gave way from brittle composure revealed itself tender and fleshy and considerably more volatile, the shards of broken composure digging into skin to draw blood that would flow like ink, and then the struggle to recompose herself, something that could be aided only by those who both cared for her most and knew her best. For now, Eärwen did not know these things about her, but she had been a princess in Alqualondë long enough to recognize the panic of someone not realizing that the tall, silver-haired woman they had been speaking to was the daughter of King Olwë. What sparked in Anairë’s eyes was close enough to the panic Eärwen had seen in so many Ñoldorin visitors to her own home.

Well, have a little mercy on this woman. Eärwen would.

Eärwen held up both of her hands, parallel to her body, palms out towards Anairë. “Peace, Anairë. It is hardly as though I wear a sign around my neck.” Spotting the movement of her lips, guessing what it would mean from other over-decorous Ñoldor she had met, Eärwen went on, “and I do not stand on ceremony. ‘Eärwen’ is fine.”

Staring up into her face, Anairë did not exactly look like a paragon of confidence. She opened her mouth as if to argue, but seemingly thought better of it. Instead, she nodded stiffly, a motion in her legs that looked like a hastily cut-off bow. “Eärwen, then. I was…” She chanced a glance at the section of stone where she had been sitting, a small grimace flitting across her lips. “I do not think you would find what I have been doing very interesting, but if you wish to sit here with me, I would not say no.”

Eärwen would never know, later, if the offer had been made out of a scrupulous need to be polite, or if it had been a cloaked effort on Anairë’s part to find company for herself. In the days to come, when they knew each other better, there would be many times when Anairë presented the former, but meant the latter. It was never entirely certain which one she meant, though, not until after Eärwen had chosen to act on the latter assumption and saw either pleasure or discomfort sneak across Anairë’s face, to be hidden behind her lips.

And in this first meeting, when she knew so little about Anairë, she certainly could not say which was true. All she could do was take Anairë at her word that the offer was made in earnestness, and sit down at her side on the edge of the pool.

Briefly, Eärwen looked back behind her, down into the water. The cloud of ink had diffused, discoloring the stretch of water from where they were sitting to about four feet away a very, very faint gray, but only very, very faint, and what colored the waters much more strongly was the Treelight which had now reached the crest of the Mingling, the air dancing with rippling currents of gold and silver. The water reflected that rippling light and intensified the effect, and in the reflection cast by the water, Eärwen saw her face staring back at her, painted gold and silver, something that did not look at all like herself.

It was not as distressing as a reflection that didn’t look like her could have been, but still, Eärwen preferred her reflection in the water of Alqualondë—both the ocean, and what she would find in the basin in her bedroom. There was nothing in this reflection that could signify, and thus, she tore her gaze away from it.

Without any ink, Anairë had been left to stare down at her piece of parchment in frustration, her stylus poised in her hand, but no words capable of flowing from it. She was holding the parchment at such an angle that Eärwen could not make out clearly what she had written down, but given her previous level of absorption in her writing, it was most likely not some sort of dry academic assignment.

Anairë’s hands trembled slightly under scrutiny. Eärwen knew of only one way to learn exactly what she had been writing.

Eärwen did not deal in prevarication. If she wanted to know something, she would ask.

“I noticed you were quite absorbed in whatever it is you’re writing,” she remarked conversationally. “May I see it?”

Another bout of color flooded into Anairë’s face. She slammed her hands down flat over the parchment, uncaring of potentially smudging the ink. “I… I would really rather you did not,” she stammered. Her eyes darted frenetically over Eärwen’s face. “Meaning no disrespect, but while I enjoy to write, I do not think that anything I write is of a high-enough quality to share. I… Meaning no disrespect,” and the second time she was saying that, her voice was brittle enough that Eärwen half-expected it to shatter and cut her, “but I do not wish to share it. If ever I have the confidence required to publish any of my…” She paused, a smile wending its way across her lips. Not a particularly happy smile, but not the bitter one Eärwen had expected, either. “…My writings, I will send a copy on to you. Or give it to you, if you happen to be in Tirion. Do you like to read?” she asked, tilting her head in curiosity so that one yet-bound lock of braided hair. “Meaning no disrespect,” and this third time, there was nothing in the phrase but curiosity, a curiosity that stretched a little too far, perhaps, but plainly not in malice, “but I have heard that the oral tradition is more favored in Alqualondë.”

Eärwen might have never visited Tirion before, but she was not deaf to the gossip, ‘oral tradition is more favored’ in most mouths meaning something along the lines of ‘I’ve heard over half of the Falmari are completely illiterate; can you _believe_ it?’

(Perhaps the seeds of the Unrest had been planted a little further back in time than Eärwen had thought. Moringotto made for such an appealing scapegoat, but though she was just a little child when she had left Endóre behind her, Eärwen could well remember the disputes that would periodically break out between the Falmari. Moringotto made for an appealing scapegoat, and Eärwen knew that plenty of the blame could be rested at his feet. But it did not do to forget the Ellalië’s _deep_ capacity for getting on each other’s nerves, and reacting poorly to it. It did not do to forget that, at all.)

Stiffening ever so slightly, she turned Anairë’s words over in her mind, scoured the cadence of her voice for any sign of anything underneath. But there was nothing. The question was just that: a question, with nothing hanging onto it like rotting seaweed would hang on to a ship that had long sailed around the coasts of the Blessed Realm.

Eärwen found it rather refreshing, honestly.

“Truth be told, I am not a great reader, myself. My time is often occupied with other things, both my duties and my preferred diversions. Written script has been slow in reaching my people, but I _do_ know it; I wouldn’t be able to perform half of my duties without it.” Eärwen groped through her mind for something she could offer Anairë, after what she had already asked of her. “There was a book of riddles that I quite liked.”

Anairë’s eyes lit up, noticeable even in the mingled gold and silver light twinkling all around them. “Really? Which one was it…”

-0-0-0-

Eärwen had been back in Tirion for a week, for the first time since Isil and Anar were hung in the sky to serve as pale reflections of Ninquelótë and Culúrien, when she first learned of the writings.

Later, she would never be certain whether Arafinwë had meant to keep it from her, or if he was so distracted by _everything_ else that was now his burden to bear that he simply never got around to it. Eärwen had yet to ask him. She had yet to work out for herself whether she would be asking the question angrily, or sadly, or irritably, or if she would be asking the question with a blunt, simple lack of anything resembling surprise.

She _had_ noticed Anairë’s absence in the place, and on one of the few times she felt like speaking to Arafinwë at all, she had endeavored to ask him about it. Had Anairë gone to Valmar, she asked, to be with her kin who had remained in the Blessed Realm after all of her other kin had left it?

 _No_ , Arafinwë had told her. Anairë had not gone to Valmar. Anairë had not been seen leaving the house she had shared with Ñolofinwë and their children since that husband and those children of hers had left Tirion behind them for good.

That… Anairë had always been a bit of a homebody. Eärwen had never been able to persuade her to make the journey to Alqualondë; Anairë had not wanted to go so far from the light of the Trees. There were times when Eärwen thought it was only Anairë’s great piety and the presence of so many kin in Valmar that made it possible for her to even _think_ about leaving Tirion to go there, let alone _actually_ go there. Anairë was not fond of traveling. Anairë was not particularly adventurous.

Anairë was a bit of a homebody, and as the Unrest deepened, ‘homebody’ veered rather closer to ‘recluse’ than anything else. She had, in those days, rarely left her house, and almost never without being accompanied by at least one of her immediate family. Or Eärwen or Arafinwë, either together or separately. There was nothing outside worth seeing, she had insisted peevishly, unless in highly select company, for if the Ñoldor could not be persuaded to be harmonious with one another in their _own_ city, then the sight of that city was largely become loveless to her.

Anairë had not been interested in picking fights with anyone—and those ‘rousing debates’ regarding literary genres and styles, Eärwen thought, did not count (Only one chair had been thrown, to Eärwen’s knowledge. That was child’s play compared to what the Ñoldor had gotten up to later.). Eärwen certainly appreciated that, since it had made it easier for her, as well as everyone else in Anairë’s circle, to look after her during those days of tension and tumult trying to bubble up over the surface. Anairë had not been interested in picking fights with anyone, had not been interested in being drawn into arguments started by anyone else, and had not been interested in being present on the _site_ of any fights or arguments or what-have-you. The one time she had exerted herself, it was to appear at her husband’s side at Fëanáro cornered Ñolofinwë with a sword.

Naturally, Eärwen had not expected Anairë to emerge from her house gladly while Tirion was still gripped in the sour tension of its discontent. Anairë had decided that her best strategy to avoid being sucked up into the discontent was to avoid it entirely, or, at least, as much as was physically possible for her to do. And in the darkness…

In the darkness, it had been at best difficult to drag Anairë out of a house, out of a lit place into a dark one.

But there was light, now, and there was not nearly enough people left in Tirion to foment the sort of unrest that had gripped the Ñoldor in the days of the waning of the Trees. It was the sort of environment where Eärwen would have thought that Anairë would at least be willing to _emerge_ from her house. And yet, nothing.

( _“Have you_ seen _her since your return to the city?”_

_“I sent word to her that I had returned. I asked if I could visit her in her home. I have received no reply.”_

_A jittery laugh burst from Eärwen’s mouth. “Do we know for certain that she yet_ lives? _”_

 _Arafinwë grimaced. “I… I have sent men to watch her house,” he admitted reluctantly, the words dragging themselves from his mouth. “Not the most upright method, I know, but I considered it better than crossing her threshold without her leave. They have seen movement in the house. On occasion, a woman comes to the window, a woman that they_ have _identified as Anairë. And the servants yet come and go to the market to buy food and other items.”_

 _“But never has_ she _left the house?”_

 _This time, Arafinwë shook his head violently while he grimaced, screwing his eyes shut. “…No. No, I have not.”_ )

And yet, nothing. And nothing, and nothing. Eärwen had been in Tirion for a week, now, and no sight of Anairë. She had walked past the house where Anairë had once lived in with her family, and now lived in alone, many times, hoping each time for any sign of Anairë’s presence in the windows or the doorway or the garden out front of the house. Nothing. Eärwen had not seen Anairë’s face, nor heard her face, nor smelled the light, airy perfume she occasionally wore when the mood struck her.

But that was not to say that Eärwen had had no sign of Anairë. Indeed, as Arafinwë finally chose to inform her of, Eärwen had plenty of signs of Anairë, if she knew where to look. If she knew what to _read_.

“Are you certain you wish to read?”

“Yes.”

“ _Are_ you certain?” Arafinwë pressed, with an odd insistence.

Eärwen stared at him hard, before nodding firmly. “Yes.”

“This is the newest one,” Arafinwë murmured to her, handing Eärwen the pamphlet and then leaving the room before Eärwen could make clear—to him, or to herself—whether or not she wanted his company at this moment.

Honestly, it was probably for the best that he had left. Her feelings as tangled as they were, Eärwen was not certain that she would not have shouted at him when she meant to speak softly to him.

_You left our children you let them leave you kept going past Alqualondë you left in the first place_

Eärwen drew a deep, whistling breath through her nose. The sound was a little like the wind whistling over the ruffled surface of the waters that stretched out to the horizon past the yet-bloody shores of Alqualondë. It soothed her, for she knew she would not hear such a sound out of anywhere but her own nose or her own mouth for quite some time. It soothed her enough to flip open the pamphlet, and read whatever it was Anairë had written there, that had Arafinwë so skittish.

It would be useless to recount the exact words, for to Eärwen, they made little sense. They were circuitous, one following after the other in circle after circle after circle, never marking out a path that was comprehensible, let alone capable of being followed to an endpoint. And yet, Eärwen found her attention pinned raptly upon the little pamphlet, compelled to read it from cover to cover.

She was not the only one. She was told that several of these pamphlets had been published already, and that they had been popular reading in Tirion for quite some time.

Not cheerful reading. That much had been made very clear to Eärwen. They were not cheerful writings, and they had not been received cheerfully. But all who read them were raptly focused upon them, were drawn to return to them over and over again, and the moment a new pamphlet was published, it was snapped up like the rarest of precious gems.

As Eärwen read on, and on, and on, it was plain that the popularity of Anairë’s writings did not owe to any family or affinal connection of hers. Not at all.

The work spoke of darkness. It spoke of a darkness without end, without relief. It spoke of flowers withering, trees ossifying in the dark, of the pitch black punctuated with the rot and decay of everything that must surely die without the blessing of light upon them. The pamphlet spoke of stars that flickered, quavered, and died, their faint light far from enough to illuminate the darkness that rolled inexorably over the land even when they still lived, and once they died, the last relief to endless, impenetrable, unconquerable darkness was gone, forever. Whatever was unfortunate enough to live in this land must grope in the blind dark, until the perils that stalked the dark found them, and all that was left of them were chewed and broken bones for the survivors to trip over as they fled their own demise.

_‘And all shall beseech the Valar for intercession, but their cries shall be in vain, for the Calaquendi forsook all hope of favor or mercy when they brought violence to these hallowed lands…’_

No, not cheerful reading at all.

The thing that really struck Eärwen, though, the thing that would stay with her, she thought, for the rest of her days, was that it was not written as an account of past events. Oh, the account, circuitous and at times confusing as it was, was very close to an exact account of the Darkening, and it was clear that the memory of it had not faded from Anairë’s memory at all. (Eärwen could guess how likely it was that the Darkening would ever fade from Anairë’s memory. She could guess how likely it was that the Darkening would ever fade from the memory of any who lived through it. Even she, who had been born into dark-and-starlit Endóre, had never known anything like it, and her memory pinned it to her mind with the vividness of sunrise over the Sea on a cloudless morning.)

The work was not written in the past tense. Instead, it seemed to function more as a prophecy of the future.

Eärwen could not remember if Anairë had ever confided in her a gift for prophecy.

-0-0-0-

“You say you were born under the light of the stars, and that you knew no other until your people made the journey to Aman?”

Though Anairë could rarely be budged from the city proper, there were occasions when someone, invariably one of those closest to her, could persuade her to go into the fields surrounding Tirion, those rolling plains of grass that, under the power of wind, rolled and rippled like the fathomless waters of the Sea, if enough of Culúrien’s light could reach through the cleft in the mountains to turn the waters it touched a rich, golden hue. Even Anairë, a great city-lover, and a greater lover of only two cities in particular, could not deny the rich, unbound natural beauty of such a location.

Even if she did start to sneeze after too long out in the grass.

It was after one of those swift, heaving sneezes that she had asked the question, possibly because she wanted to distract from the indignity of sneezing repeatedly in the company of a Lindarin princess. (Eärwen had tried to convince her not to stand so stiffly on the politeness of a half-Ñoldorin, half-Vaniai lady who had had decorum fed to her as a child the way other children were fed milk and sweetmeats.) Well, those poking, not-quite-prodding questions were something Eärwen far preferred to silence, and Anairë had answered all of Eärwen’s questions thus far. She was glad that these attempts at intimacy, however clumsy and fumbling they might have been, were not going to go unreciprocated.

She would have loved to have drawn Anairë into something like comfort. But that was a wish for another time, and she had persuaded Anairë to lie down in the tall grass at her side, staring up into the incandescent silver sky. There was that, at least. They had this, at least.

“Yes, I did say,” Eärwen confirmed, a small smile curling over her lips. Birds wheeled overhead, black against the silver, their squawks harsh in the sweet quiet of wind and rustling grass and soft voices. “It was a long time before my father’s people could make up their minds on whether they wanted to come here—and then longer before the Valar made up their minds as to whether they _wanted_ us here. There was more than enough time for a whole generation of Ellalië to be born while the Valar were dragging their heels.”

“’Ellalië…’” Anairë rolled the word over in her mouth like she was trying to balance marbles on her tongue. As Eärwen turned her head away from the sky to look at Anairë’s face, she could see Anairë, still staring up at the sky, entertaining a strange half-smile on her delicate lips. “I will never get over that dialect. I think I shall carry it with me unto the breaking of the world.”

Eärwen rolled her eyes. “’Tis not my fault the Vaniai insist on preserving everything as it was at the start and never changing anything, even though it’s been centuries and the world will not crack in two if we change the pronunciations of certain words. Truly, I know that it won’t.”

Now, Anairë was turning her head as well. The side of her face pressed against earth was obscured by hair, a gleam of blue from her left eye all that was visible. The other side of her face… was also half-obscured by hair, stray strands brushing against her cheeks as they sought to hang straight down and tangle in the hair on the other side of her head. Enough of the right hand side of Anairë’s face was yet visible that Eärwen could clearly make out her raising one eyebrow quizzically. “How do you know?” she probed, rolling her shoulders gently. This only served to nearly completely obscure her face with hair and, predictably, Anairë raised an irritable hand to brush her hair away. “Are you an expert?”

Never could Eärwen tell if Anairë was being entirely serious when she asked questions such as this. She had a way about her where you would never quite dare ask her if she was joking, for her mouth never so much as twitched and the raised arch of her eyebrow was certainly quizzical, but there was nothing in it that could be easily marked out as humorous. Eärwen sometimes imagined, half-seriously, with the other half devoted to some quiet fascination she could not place, if Anairë practiced such expressions in front of a mirror. For them to be so perfectly devoid of any thread Eärwen could trace back to humor, she thought that they _had_ to have been practiced. But this was Anairë. It was entirely possible that it was just something that came to her naturally.

Well, if Anairë was not going to give Eärwen any hints, she might as well follow this to its logical conclusion.

After her own, particular fashion.

“Why, yes, I am,” Eärwen retorted with a laugh. “I am the greatest expert of all that you will ever meet; never will you meet a greater expert than I on the nature of words, and their ability to break or not break the world.”

There came from Anairë an indelicate noise, quickly stifled, that sounded quite a lot like a snort.

Emboldened, “And I tell you, Anairë, that the evolution of words will not so much as lay a scratch upon the world, let alone risk breaking it. The only thing likely to break are the hearts and the patience of the lore-masters in Valmar and the other cities of the Vaniai. And I am sure that they will make a _noise_ that we might mistake for the breaking of the world, but I promise you, when the noise subsides, for their throats will no doubt give out before Ilúvatar loses patience, the world will still be intact.” She paused, staring up at the sky, while a smile slowly crept over her mouth. “Though I fear you might find a few more deaf Ellalië when next you visit Valmar after has ceased the wailing.”

A spate of startled laughter, harmonizing with the caws of the birds that wheeled and wheeled so far overhead, rattled the air around them. “It never ceases to amaze me,” Anairë managed, voice still wobbling, when at last she was able to beat down her laughter, “the sort of casual blasphemy I hear falling from your lips. Listening to you, I would almost think you had a direct means of correspondence with Ilúvatar himself, until I remember that you are simply wont to joke, for love of needling me in to some sort of retort.”

“Only because it is so easy, Anairë; only because it is so easy.” Eärwen raised an eyebrow, pinning Anairë with a mirthful stare. “What was so different today, that you would not rise to it?”

Anairë raised both hands, trying and failing to smooth her hair down completely. “You veered a little too close to the ridiculous, I am afraid. Aiming for the breaking of the world was a little too far out of your scope.”

“I will keep that in mind for the next time I wish to scandalize you.”

Anairë turned away. “And I,” she murmured, an odd hitch in her voice, “will endeavor to recall that you do so purposely.”

“Hmm.”

Eärwen could have lied in the silence that had suffused them for years, she thought. It was soft and warm, like a blanket stuffed with duck-down wrapped around you on a spring night just shy of chilly. Her gaze traversed the stretch of sky made visible to them, and they followed the wheeling progress of spinning black birds, who now flew without making so much as a single sound. The only noise that came to her hearing was the faint whistle of Anairë’s breath, and Anairë breathing, untroubled, without the slightest hint of agitation, was something Eärwen trusted to lull her into a peaceful sleep, if she let it go on for long enough.

But Anairë had asked her a question in all seriousness, and Eärwen had sensed even from the beginning something else sitting behind it, some other trail of conversation Anairë had wanted to wander down. Anairë had allowed Eärwen to draw her this far from Tirion, this far from her books and her parchment and quills and stylus and ink. She had not voiced any desire for return payment, but never let it be said that Eärwen did not know the meaning of the word ‘reciprocation.’ Never let it be said that Eärwen was a cheapskate, or stingy. Never let it be said that Eärwen was not generous to her friends. Her past held no horrors for her that had not evaporated in the light that poured through the cleft in the mountains. It held no horrors for her that were yet unspeakable.

Perhaps she could do some good with it.

“Yes, Anairë, I was born into the starlight of Endóre. My parents were hardly going to wait for blissful safety to have the child they so wished for, especially not when the Valar were taking so long to bring them to blissful safety that it seemed to them that Father would be old enough to grow a beard by the time they came here, or else that something would come screaming out of the dark and deprive them of the chance to have a child at all.”

Eärwen had said the words lightly. Truly, she’d not expected them to have _no_ effect on Anairë at all—Anairë had been born _here_ , born into safety beyond compare, with no conception of what it was to live in a place where she could not wander wherever she pleased, unarmed and unaccompanied—but the effect her words _did_ have, the full body flinch that wracked Anairë’s body, had not at all been what Eärwen had intended. Not been something she had even dreamed could occur.

(Eärwen was, perhaps, a little more naïve than she had thought herself, with her birth in Endóre and the vast majority of her life then spent in a place where sorrow was typically nothing more than a distant nightmare. Perhaps she had not thinking quite as much as she ought to have been.)

“I was told no such thing,” Anairë let out, voice trembling like a slender little aspen tree in the middle of a storm. “No one spoke to me of such things, when I was educated on the March away from Cuiviénen as a child.”

“No, I imagine not.” Eärwen’s hand found Anairë’s shoulder, fingers gently rubbing against the cloth of Anairë’s long, dark dress. “I… Forgive me, Anairë; I did not think. Of course, it’s not the sort of thing you would tell a child in a place like this; it’s the sort of thing that can wait for adulthood, if it ever comes at all. I… Again, forgive me. You have always been such a voracious consumer of stories; I had thought you would know of this, even if you had only happened upon it briefly. Do you…”

It was difficult to say how the question would be received. Anairë did not turn her nose up at knowledge; when circumstances allowed her access to texts, she descended upon them with hungry zeal. But she was still lying stiff in the grass at Eärwen’s side, none of the tension that entered into her limbs after that flinch having bled out of them yet. And there were many, Eärwen had learned, many in Tirion, Ñoldor and Vaniai alike, who did not like to remember the perils that had punctuated the lives of the Ellalië in the land where they first awakened. Did not like to think about the deaths. Did not like to think about the kidnappings, the disappearances. Did not like to think about the amount of time it had taken for passage to the Blessed Realm to be obtained.

Anairë might be one of those, might be one of those who wished only to look to the future, rather than at the past. Eärwen had never stopped to think about it in that way. But there was a part of her that wanted to believe, wanted to believe that Anairë’s curiosity, her zeal for knowledge, was stronger than her desire to never know anything of danger. Wanted to believe that their minds could meet there, in the place where knowledge met the thrumming uncertainty of not knowing what lied over the crest of the hill, of not knowing what was waiting for you in the deep shadows of the trees. Wanted to believe that Anairë could turn her eyes east to the Sea and what lied beyond it, and regard the lands she had never known for herself with curiosity, rather than shuddering rejection.

The idea of that shuddering rejection made Eärwen flinch in turn, for though the idea was thoroughly irrational, it felt to her as if it would have been a rejection aimed at _her_.

Anairë drew a long, slightly unsteady breath through her nose. Then, very slowly, she shook her head. “I would not turn away from knowledge,” she muttered. “Ilúvatar made all the world, and all that dwells within it only lives on account of his wisdom and mercy. Even the twisted figures that were born in the dark and the tumult of Endóre before the Valar came are reflections of the designs of Ilúvatar and the Ainur in the time before the world was formed. Warped reflections,” Anairë allowed, “but reflections, all the same. I don’t think…” Another long breath, this one through her mouth. “…I do not think it proper to turn my thoughts away from the creations of Ilúvatar, even those that have been corrupted. It seems like sacrilege, to be very honest. So yes, Eärwen, whatever you have to say to me, I will listen to it.”

It… That was rather less enthusiastic than Eärwen would have hoped. She would not forget that Anairë’s curiosity came tinged with the hesitation of a woman who had lived ever in a blessed land, blessed with light and safety and warmth, and did not want to carry images of a polluted, corrupted world into her dreams. Eärwen would not seek to patronize—she knew how quickly Anairë would sense it, knew just how poorly Anairë would take to it. But if she could paint a picture in Anairë’s mind, could paint her a picture of a land that, however corrupted and polluted by the designs of their enemy as it might have been, still had beauty in it. She wanted Anairë to be able to believe that the lands over the Sea, the lands the Ellalië (well, most of them) had left behind, were lands that were worth living in, even if the Valar had wished for the Ellalië to come here and then never leave.

Eärwen had been born in those lands. She did not want to leave Anairë with the idea that there was nothing about Endóre worth preserving, nothing worth seeing with her own eyes.

So. Eärwen would have to tread carefully. Very carefully.

 _At least I have plenty of_ good _memories of those times living on that other seashore._

“By the time I was born,” Eärwen murmured, “the Ainur had made contact with my people. I have never understood quite what the delay was, but I appreciate the fact that it allowed me to be born in Endóre. I do not think I would have been the same person that I am now, had I been born in the Blessed Realm. I…” She paused to laugh, a shaky, wobbly sound that was soon lost in the silver air. “Do you know, I do not particularly care to imagine what sort of person I would have been, had I never known what it is to live in Endóre? I do not know whether that person would be worse or perhaps better than myself, but I don’t think they would be someone I recognize. The years I spent in Endóre are a part of me, and I do not think they can be extricated and leave me yet myself. Ah, but I am getting off track.

“When I was born, the Lindar had already been in contact with the Ainur for many years. The first sound I heard that had not its roots in the voices of my family was the voice of the Sea lapping against the shore of Endóre. Well, I say ‘voice,’ but the Sea, what portion of the Sea met the land there, had many different voices. Here, storms are rare, and I have never known a storm that has wrecked a ship, or flooded a house. There—“ Eärwen could almost hear the roar of the Sea in its fury, and though she knew many who had been born in Endóre alongside her who would have quailed at the sound, but to her, it had been something almost like a lullaby. She who her mother had named ‘Sea-maiden’ could do nothing but accept the Sea in its entirety, was incapable of anything but loving the Sea, no matter what mood or face it showed to her. “—In Endóre, it was rather different. The Sea was wilder there; it had not been tamed for the convenience of those who were not supposed to know anything but bliss and perfect safety. The Sea showed us all of its faces, untamed and unabashed, and it sang to us in all of its voices.”

“Hmm.” Anairë brought one of her legs up, hiking it up so that her skirt was pulled taut at the knee. “That sounds rather like a river in flood.”

The comparison would have been laughable, if Eärwen was inclined to laugh at someone who had never seen the Sea except the far-off glimmers of darkling blue from the summit of Túna, someone who had never known even the mild face of the Sea off the coasts of the Blessed Realm, let alone the Sea in all its terrible glory, as Eärwen had known it on the shores of Endóre. But she was not. Frankly, the idea of someone, anyone, who knew the Sea only as a far-off glimmer of darkling blue, let alone _Anairë_ , who was ever-hungry for knowledge and hampered only by her intense aversion to travel, made Eärwen rather sad. The Ellalië had awoken for the first time at the shores of Cuiviénen. The babble and joyful laughter of gentle waters had been the first noise the first generation of the Ellalië ever heard. The idea of any member of the Ellalië never hearing the rush of the Sea for themselves, never knowing water as water truly could be, carried with it such a powerful wrongness that, to Eärwen, the idea for a moment dimmed the bliss of the Blessed Realm, put a wrongness in the soil to rival the wrongness of the twisted creatures that had stalked the shadows that lurked past the campfires in Endóre.

_One day, no matter how I must beg or wheedle or cajole, I must convince her to visit Alqualondë with me. I must convince me to come to the lips of the Sea, and hear its song for her own self._

“Nothing of the sort,” Eärwen retorted, though she was careful to gentle her voice with a laugh. “Oh, my dear Anairë, one day I will take you to the shores of the Sea and you will see the Sea in all of its majesty. I very much look forward to it, for I think you would enjoy it. Truly, I do think that all of the Ellalië should stand by the Sea at least once, and drink in the sight and the sound of it. More than once, ideally, but I know you do not wish to stray too far from your home.”

Too far from the light of the Trees, more importantly. Sometimes, Eärwen thought that _that_ was what Anairë’s true problem was. Though she did not wish to be dragged away from her writing desk for too long, Anairë exhibited no true aversion to traveling to Valmar. Part of that, Eärwen would allow, was likely that it would put Anairë in closer proximity to her kin among the Vaniai, allow her to visit her grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. And Valmar, a city that Eärwen had by now visited twice, _was_ immensely beautiful. It was beautiful in a way that nothing else could be beautiful. Though built by the Ellalië, the influences of the Ainur dug their fingers deep into the architecture, producing something so profoundly alien that, had Eärwen not been surrounded by other Ellalië while in the city, she would have thought she had been transported into another world entirely. It was a city profoundly alien, but in a way that Eärwen could appreciate. The unearthliness of it was not jarring; instead, it felt more right than anything Eärwen had seen, short of the Sea and the shape of her home beside it.

Valmar did not feel entirely like a place where Ellalië should be living. But Ellalië were living in it, nonetheless, and their presence softened the unearthliness of Valmar. Sometimes, Eärwen wondered if she would think Valmar so beautiful if there were no Ellalië living there, wondered if she would accept the unearthliness of it were it so unearthly that only the Ainur could live there. But that was beside the point of what she had been supposing. The earthliness, or lack thereof, of Valmar, that was a topic that would have to wait for another day.

To get back on topic: Anairë, Eärwen suspected, did not wish to make the journey to Alqualondë less because she was such a homebody, and more because it would require taking her further out of the light of the Trees than she cared to be. She would hardly be alone in that. During her time in Tirion, Eärwen had overheard many people (and she had yet to decide for herself whether those people had really meant for her to overhear or not) express such an opinion. To them, the only lands that mattered were the lands bathed in the light of Ninquelótë and Culúrien, the lands that were blessed by the light that Yavanna had granted to the world by way of her greatest creations, and everything else was beneath notice and thought.

Those people, Eärwen strongly suspected, had been born in this Blessed Realm. These people had never known what Endóre could be when fostered by the hands of Ellalië who sought to heal the scars in the land and set roots down in it with love and devotion, and Eärwen would not be surprised if their parents fell into this category, as well. These people, Eärwen would admit to resenting just a little bit, for how could you completely write off a land you had never seen? How could you condemn something you had never experienced to the status of being so totally beneath your notice?

Anairë was not like that, or so Eärwen hoped. That she was unwilling to turn her thoughts aside from any of the creations of Ilúvatar was a good sign. Eärwen hoped there would be more good signs to follow.

She hoped that, in time, she could convince Anairë that a land that was touched only faintly by the light of the Trees was a land worth visiting. A land residing in for a long while, perhaps. Eärwen did not think that a week-long visit would be long enough, not nearly long enough, to show Anairë all the wonders of Alqualondë and the surrounding seaside. It would take months, at least. Maybe a year.

If Anairë would let her. That remained an open question.

“I was born Tirion,” Anairë replied diffidently. “It is where I belong. Certainly, I do not think any other city in Aman is well-suited to me, not enough to live in permanently.”

“Oh, I agree,” Eärwen remarked airily. “I do not think there is enough ink in all of Alqualondë to satisfy the likes of you— _really_ , Anairë, what it is that you are always writing when I come to find you?”

Color flooded into Anairë’s cheeks. “That is _none_ of your concern!” she spluttered. Her hands flew to her face, palms flat against her forehead. “You will learn what I write of if I ever choose to publish any of it, and not before.”

“What, I don’t get a sneak peek?”

“Oh, you are _incorrigible_. You wouldn’t want to see anything I didn’t think worthy of publishing. Even the best of my pieces will likely need at least a dozen more edits before I would even _dream_ of submitting it to a publisher.” Anairë fisted her hands in her hair. “Anonymously, Eärwen, _anonymously_!”

At this point, Eärwen was beginning to think that Anairë was not being entirely serious. Just call it a suspicion.

Apparently, Anairë had now decided that it was time to be serious once more. Slowly, deliberately, seemingly going out of her way to try to avoid mussing her hair as much as possible, Anairë took her hands away from her head, letting them rest on her abdomen. She stared fixedly up at the silver sky, perhaps following the wheeling tracks of the black birds, perhaps not, as she murmured, “You were telling me of Endóre. I do not see how my writings could of any real interest, when compared to the works of Ilúvatar which I have never seen, and will no doubt never see.”

 _Never see_. There were times when the Valar’s prohibition against returning to Endóre rankled, when it grated against Eärwen’s flesh like sandpaper. This was one of them. They still had kin over in those distant lands. Why should they _not_ be allowed to see them again?

But that was something far beyond Eärwen’s power to change. And such things as were beyond her power to change, she tried not to dwell upon overmuch. It would serve her only ill, to dwell upon things beyond her ability to affect in any way.

And if Eärwen listened to her own bitterness, she feared for the effect that would have on the type of story she was trying to tell, the kind of picture she was trying to paint for Anairë’s benefit. She feared it would turn the story she meant to tell into something entirely different.

(There would come a time, much, much later, when that bitterness infected every memory of Eärwen’s regarding the past. Even the memories that were only barely touched still tasted of that bitterness, and oh, it did indeed color the memories, did indeed curdle the joy of them, until Eärwen could look back at no moment of her life without feeling that uncertainty, without feeling as if the world was shifting beneath her feet. She knew that, once, she had felt joy without any shadow touching it. But she could not remember what that joy had been like, when it had no shadow touching it. She could not remember it at all. The feeling was not saddening so much as it was disorienting, as it was like finding that whatever it was that tethered her to the earth and kept her from soaring off into the sky was looser. She felt as if every step she took was putting her in danger of leaving the ground forever.

But that was a story for another time.)

“I do wish that that was not the case,” Eärwen admitted, because it would have been useless to pretend otherwise. “I wish I could take you there to see it for yourself. Granted, it has been centuries since last I saw those lands for myself, and we might well find them much changed, but such is the nature of Endóre. Change comes to it more easily than to Aman. This place was built to be timeless and ageless; Endóre was built to be a land of youth and prime and mid-life and senescence. Sometimes, I believe that to be in that land, as one of the Ellalië, might be disorienting, might be like being the rock in the river that never budges as the water rushes around it, but we were born there, were we not? We awoke there, didn’t we? I believe that we were meant to be there, even if we can thrive just as much in Aman.

“I was born by the Sea, and the Ellalië were not alone there, in our little houses and halls. Ossë and Uinen kept a close watch over us. When I was a little girl, I would play by the seaside, and Uinen would come up onto the sands and help me make sandcastles. She would send Ossë to find pretty shells and pearls on the seabed to decorate my walls and towers with, and when the other children came to play with us, we would make castle after castle after castle. Sometimes we would play at parties, at inviting other children over, and each of us would coo and praise the other’s craftsmanship. Sometimes we would all work together to make a sandcastle so large that, were it made of sturdier materials, we could have lived inside it comfortably. Sometimes we would carry pails of water and make moats for our castles so deep that we could swim in them. Sometimes we would knock down the walls of our castles with zeal and shrieks of joy, and scatter the pearls and pretty shells the Maiar had brought to us about the shore so that everyone could see them.”

Beside her, Anairë made a small humming noise in her throat. “I cannot imagine ever destroying any of the works of my hands,” she murmured pensively. “Even the meanest of them are precious to me in a way, even if I would never force the sight of them on others. Was it because of…” Her mouth spasmed in something between a grimace and a smile. “You were living in constant danger. Was it because of that?”

“Really? No, I don’t think so. I see children performing much the same way on the shores of the Blessed Realm—their parents occasionally join in, as well.” It had been so long since Eärwen had last bent her will to making a _really_ good sandcastle. She had not thought she missed it, but now, she was missing the feeling of sand slipping between her fingers, sand caking under her fingernails, sand dusting her bare knees and grating against her skin. “I think it is just a natural impulse in us—and there is no harm in destroying a sandcastle, after all, so long as you are destroying your own, or, if you’re going after someone else’s, you do it by their leave.” Eärwen ran a hand through her hair and laughed. “We make so much of how different life in Endóre was from life in the Blessed Realm, but many aspects of it were not so different at all. I think it is just that being able to settle down in one place, without having to be constantly on the move, has allowed us to advance more than would have been possible in Endóre.”

“But the dangers of the land!” Anairë protested. She gesticulated with her hands, not with a wildness but with a marked disorder that was nevertheless tightly controlled; her hands fluttered like the wings of birds, if plucked of all of their feathers. “What of all that lurked in the darkness? What of all that stalked your steps?”

Eärwen paused at that. She _had_ still been quite young when they made the journey over the Sea, and she knew that while it was difficult to hide things from a curious and enterprising child, it was also difficult even for a curious and enterprising child to understand all that was going on around her. Her view of the world was necessarily skewed, for she had had so little experience of it that most of the things that went on in it, she had no context for, and the seeds of those things would take root in the fertile ground of her imagination and sprout in to strange shapes that had no basis whatsoever in reality.

But though Eärwen had been quite young when she left Endóre behind her forever, she had lived her life on the starlit shores with both of her eyes open, and her ears open even wider. Children were not allowed the privilege of willful blindness or willful deafness, not there (Those children who were actually blind or deaf were kept close to their parents’ sides). She had known that there were dangers lurking on the edge of their settlement. But she had known other things, as well.

“If someone went off alone,” Eärwen said slowly, “then yes, they would be in great danger. Our enemies lurking in the dark prosecuted their war against us with great zeal, but I honestly think of them as utter cravens, for by the time I was a child in Endóre, they would only seize one of the Ellalië if that person was wandering alone.

“Where we were in peril alone, we found safety in greater numbers. That is the root of any community, is it not? We find something in a community that we cannot find if we shut ourselves away from the world and from everyone in it, from everyone who could love us and protect us and guide us and aid us. When we were together, we were stronger against the darkness. We were stronger against the dangers that dwelled there. The things that lurked just out of sight quailed before the light of our fires and the light of our hearts and our shared joys and griefs. They could not stand against us.”

“What monsters I have heard of,” Anairë remarked, not quite a retort, not quite a challenge, but definitely something carrying the germs of a retort and a challenge within it, “did not seem like the sort of creatures who would be deterred by anything so intangible.”

Eärwen turned to look at her and smiled gently. “The light that illuminates our world is intangible. But it is not powerless, is it? We have carried our bonds until they have become stronger than steel, even if they are invisible to the eye.”

-0-0-0-

When Eärwen and Arafinwë dwelled in Tirion when the light that suffused the land was yet gold and silver rather than the pale, colorless light that marked noontide and Isil mounting the summit of the night sky, they had not dwelled in the palace. They had visited it on a regular basis, certainly, going to see Finwë and Indis and Findis—first by themselves, and then, as their brood of children grew in number, they had taken their children with them to visit with their grandparents and their eldest aunt.

Eärwen and Arafinwë had shared an airy house on the outskirts of Tirion that backed a creek that flowed down to the base of the hill, where it turned into a wide, slow ribbon of blue snaking off into the west. There, the Unrest had not been something that left them totally untouched, but they could sit in the garden or in the glade beyond the walls and drink in the scent of grass and aromatic bushes, the babble of water flowing downhill, the discordant squabble of multitudes of birds of different species putting their songs to the air to vie against each other, the soft glow of gold and silver light that did not vie together but harmonized as nothing else has ever been capable of harmonizing. The Unrest still found them from time to time, but Eärwen and Arafinwë could lie on the grass and stare up at the sky and the troubles that gripped the city proper seemed blessedly remote by comparison.

(Of course, they had several children possessed of temperaments that made it impossible for _them_ to avoid seeking out trouble forever, and when they went seeking out trouble, they had the habit of carrying that trouble back home with them. But troubles were always diluted in their house, or so Eärwen was determined to make true. Her home was supposed to be a haven, after all. She would not let anyone destroy the haven she had made of the house.)

In _Alqualondë_ , they lived in the palace, for Eärwen’s parents would not hear of their daughter, or their son-in-law, or any of their grandchildren living anywhere but with them. Eärwen’s children had grown up close in the company of their maternal grandparents and uncles, never estranged from their Lindarin family or customs. All of her children could speak the dialect, all of her children could swim in the turbulent waters of the Sea, all of her children knew how to sail a ship—Artanis and Findaráto had been taught how to make sails, and Angaráto and Aikanáro how to construct all parts of a ship, excluding the sails, from scratch.

Her children had gone to wage war. Her children had gone to wage war against a _Vala_. All of her children could be dead, at this very moment.

But Eärwen tried not to think about that. The Valar would give them no news of what went on on the other side of the Sea. They were already supposed to treat the Exiles as if they were dead to them, and those among the Ñoldor who had means of rooting out information about what was going on on the other side of the Sea would only have fallen under suspicion if they were caught doing so. Eärwen was supposed to be queen to these people, and a queen was supposed to be concerned with the welfare of her people. A queen would not induce her people to do anything that could cause them to fall afoul of the Ainur.

The house. She was thinking about the house. Her children were a tangle in her mind that it could take millennia to fully unravel. They were not present. Unless dying and coming back to her through the Houses of the Dead, they would never be present again. She could focus on that for another day, and for now, ignore the tangle, for she knew that if she tried to live cognizant of it when she had not yet the strength to tackle it, she knew the tangle would crush her under its weight.

The house. She had been thinking about the house.

Before, Eärwen and Arafinwë had stayed in a house on the outskirts of Tirion. Eärwen had never stopped thinking of Alqualondë as her home—the house in Tirion felt more like a guest house to her than anything else, though a pleasant guest house, though a guest house that served as a haven away from the tumult that was infecting Tirion with its rot. The house in Tirion had been a place where she raised her children, certainly, but it had also been a place that, to her, always felt more than anything like a place she was staying in while visiting Tirion.

Eärwen had no idea which place Arafinwë had thought of as home, the house in Tirion, the halls where he had been born, or the palace in Alqualondë. When the sky past the mountains was still illuminated by dazzling gold and silver light, she had always assumed that it was Tirion that Arafinwë considered home, though he might often seek a respite _away_ from his home.

But Eärwen had never asked him. She had never thought to ask, for the answer had seemed so obvious to her at the time. She had never asked, it was occurring to her now that that had been an oversight.

It had been an oversight, for now, they were not staying in that house on the outskirts of Tirion any longer, and Eärwen would be lying if she thought Arafinwë regarded the palace once inhabited by his parents and oldest sister as a home that was well and truly _his_.

Later, perhaps, there would be time for her to feel shame over how long it had taken for her to notice. Later, perhaps, Eärwen’s feelings regarding her husband would make sense to her again, _he_ would make sense to her again, and they would be able to talk about that shame, and what was fulminating beneath it. There was no time for that, now. There was no way for her to work out everything, right now.

Impossible not to notice, though. They had been living in this palace together for weeks, now, and Arafinwë had been living here alone for years longer than that. Eärwen had not spent every waking hour in her husband’s company (had spent none of her sleeping hours in his company; Eärwen had been quite happy to accept the offer of a separate bedchamber, and would not stop to wonder what it said that Arafinwë had _expected_ that she would want that for years yet), had not spent every day in his company, had not spent every _week_ in his company, but she did not go through life with both of her eyes closed, and when something came to her attention, there was only so long that she could go on without noticing it. Only so long that she could go on without thinking about it.

He… He had taken to being king over the Ñoldor better than Eärwen would have thought. She had wed a third son—in Endóre, he would never have been expected to inherit anything, never expected to be lord over anything, and in the Blessed Realm neither he nor either of his brothers should have _ever_ been expected to become king in Finwë’s place, for this was a place where murder should never have found anyone. Eärwen had wed a third son, and she had known when she wed him that he was not of the commanding temperament of his older brothers. That he had not been of a commanding temperament was part of his charm, honestly; Eärwen did not think she would have always gotten on so well with Ñolofinwë, and she _knew_ that she and Fëanáro were rather less than compatible, not merely as potential marriage partners, but just as _people_ in general.

Arafinwë was not naturally of a commanding temperament. He had always been a confidant for Ñolofinwë, had always been quick with steady and temperate counsel when Ñolofinwë needed it from him. He had been a ready and happy companion for Findis, always been ready to defend her against anyone who called her cold or supine. He had always been a comfort to his mother, and had always been an obedient son who would give no grief to his father. There was a fire in him, a fire like all of the Ñoldor shared, but it burned more temperately, and flared up but rarely. When Eärwen imagined men who took over the leadership of their people in times of great crisis and then managed to hold their people together without it falling apart, she did not imagine gentle, temperate men like her husband. Gentle, temperate men like her husband played supporting roles, but she had never known them to _lead_.

But lead he had, and for the first and last time, Eärwen wished she had not left Tirion for Alqualondë after news of the massacre had reached her in her darkened house by the creek, for she suspected that the story of how Arafinwë had grown into the role he now inhabited would have been an interesting one to witness. Arafinwë the king was not so different from Arafinwë the prince, but he was steadier, now, more rooted to the ground. He spoke with a quiet authority that had not been present in his voice before, and though he was certainly willing to lend his ear to anyone who might wish to give him counsel or simple advice, it was plain that they were not the ones who ruled over Tirion. He who ruled over Tirion was Arafinwë, son of Finwë, or Finwë Arafinwë, as many had begun to call him.

Arafinwë ruled over Tirion, and to Eärwen, it was clear that he was not at home in the palace that now was his.

He was not sleeping in the bedchambers that had belonged to his father. That was the first thing Eärwen had noticed. And at first, she’d not thought much of it. Who particularly wanted to sleep in their father’s old rooms _forever_ , especially when that father had been put to death so violently, and had before then abandoned you and the rest of your family for twelve years, in favor of a son who had threatened to do violence against one of his brothers? (Eärwen would be lying to say that she particularly understood Finwë’s enduring partiality towards Fëanáro, by the end. She had known widowed mothers and fathers in Endóre, and she had seen the doting, fearful love they had lavished on their children, but very few among them had been blind to their children’s faults, and she thought that if one of those children had threatened one of their siblings with violence, that would have been enough to open their widowed parent’s eyes to their faults.)

In Arafinwë’s place, Eärwen thought she would have avoided her own father or mother’s bedchambers, honestly. She’d not thought to take it as a sign of anything for a long time.

Arafinwë avoided his father’s bedchambers. As far as Eärwen knew, he had not set foot in them even once since he had returned after submitting himself to the judgment of the Valar. Anything he might have needed out of them, he had likely sent servants to retrieve. The doors were locked, and as best as Eärwen could tell, the furniture had all been left behind—well, what furniture Finwë had left behind in Tirion when he had left for Formenos with his eldest son and seven of his grandsons. (Eärwen had no idea what had become of anything Finwë, Fëanáro, or any of Fëanáro’s sons had left behind in Formenos. She had been told that Formenos had not exactly survived Moringotto’s assault unscathed, but she had no idea of the extent of the damage, and had no desire to make the journey north to see for herself—even when fully intact, Formenos had seemed like a little nothing-town, and had excited no curiosity within her.)

Arafinwë also avoided many different parts of the palace. He did not sit in the chair that had been his father’s when he received petitioners, instead sitting in a plain, thinly-cushioned wooden chair at the base of the low dais. Eärwen had been obliged to sit in on a council session on one occasion, and on top of noticing how reduced the number of councilors were, and how many chairs had been left empty, she could not help but notice that Arafinwë was not sitting in his father’s chair in here, either. His father’s chair had been set aside in a far corner of the room to gather dust, and he sat in the twin of the plain, thinly-cushioned chair that had been set up at the foot of the dais in the audience chamber.

When Arafinwë took supper, on the occasions when Eärwen took supper in the same room, it was not in the great hall where so many feasts had been held in the past (the Ñoldor might have been wont to taking themselves just a bit too seriously, but their feasts had always been superb), but in a small chamber that was clearly set up for dining in, but which Eärwen had never dined in herself when the Trees yet lived and cast their light over Tirion. She’d not even been aware that this chamber _existed_ before the first time she had eaten there in the silent company of her husband.

She didn’t care for that chamber, honestly. The windows faced west, which was good for catching the best sunsets Anar had to offer, but it felt entirely too big for the two of them. Even with every chair except for two set aside from the table, the table was too long. It was too long and too empty, and every day Eärwen expected, all through the meal, to hear footsteps pelting against the stone floor outside, to see the door swing open and one or two or three or all five of her children come storming in, demanding to know who started supper without them and where all the chairs are and why no one saved them any roast pheasant or stuffed trout. She expected so much that she was not granted. She did not care for the chamber.

So much of the palace was just… not lived in. Arafinwë had taken up the reins of power and he had taken up the occupancy of the seat of power, but he did not behave as though he was truly master of the house. Instead, he acted just the way Eärwen had always felt, living in that house by the creek on the outskirts of Tirion, except he did so with considerably less comfort. Eärwen did not think that Arafinwë regarded the palace as some sort of guest house. She did not think he regarded his current living quarters in any so casual a way.

And now, she had come upon him unawares, standing by a window facing east as Anar sank slowly below the horizon.

She had not meant it. Arafinwë was a tangle nearly as daunting as the one that constituted Eärwen’s children, but she did not like to think of herself as a cruel person. She could never regard him in the same light as she had before, but she did not go out of her way to rub salt into any wounds that might exist. She did not pass judgment on the way he ruled over the Ñoldor except for silently and in the confines of her own mind; passing judgment and making criticisms should be reserved for those who actually had some intention of _involving_ themselves in the governance of the Ñoldor. Eärwen had no intention of offering her ear as a councilor, not right now, and so she was not going to criticize. Later, perhaps, later.

Eärwen could not sort out anything regarding what she felt for her husband, after all that had happened, after what he had done and not done, after what he had and had not allowed to occur. The most time they had spent together was those silent suppers over sumptuous food that nevertheless had equal odds of turning to ash in Eärwen’s mouth when she thought of how it should have been seven at the table, rather than two. Eärwen knew which parts of the palace had been his favorite haunts when he still visited it as a prince, and she accordingly avoided them. Perhaps it was a weakness within her that caused her to avoid the potential moment of confrontation, but in spite of everything, she did not wish to cause harm.

She had not expected to find him here. It was just a random corridor; it wasn’t anywhere near the residential part of the palace, and Eärwen did not see how she could have anticipated his being here. But there he was, staring out of the window.

He had not noticed her, his eyes riveted upon the window. Arafinwë had never been particularly easy to startle, but Eärwen _knew_ him, or at least she had known him as he was when the Blessed Realm, within the cradle of the mountains, had been drenched in eternal light. She knew that look of rapt attention; if she had turned on her heel and walked back down the hall, he would never know she had been there.

But this… This was the first time Eärwen had been able to look at him, without him knowing that she was there. Now that she had such an opportunity, she found herself unexpectedly hungry to capitalize on it.

Anar set in the west of the land, and thus, the greatest and most powerful of its waning light could not touch a window that faced east, when it was backed by a wall that had no windows facing west. Nevertheless, the clear glass of the window was tinted a dull, ruddy red the angry color of a bruise so fresh it had yet to turn blue and black. This was the world they had been left with, where what light lit the sky was not the pure and sacrosanct gold and silver of Culúrien and Ninquelótë, but the bloody light of a world where the greatest works of Yavanna Kementári had been murdered and their corpses defiled. The light tainted all it touched, so thoroughly that whenever night finally fell Eärwen was always surprised to find what portions of her skin and clothes had been touched with sunset’s dying light were not stained with fresh blood.

It did not taint him. That was the most startling thing of all, though there were other things that would stay with Eärwen for longer. Arafinwë stood in the light of a dying day, touched with bloody red, but the light did not stain him. He was yet golden and straight and unblemished in the gore of a dying day, with no touch of death able to make its mark upon him.

Was this how he had stood in Alqualondë? Had he stood in his bright armor among the bloodied quays and shores of Alqualondë, hands unsteady upon the hilt of his sword? Had he looked at the mangled bodies of Ñoldor and Lindar alike and stared upon them with sadness? With anger? With fear?

Had he said anything to Fëanáro when at length he had made his way to this scene? Of all the reports Eärwen had received of the Kinslaying, she had never heard any of them tell her of the way Arafinwë had responded to it, beyond the fact that it had not been enough to stop him. What Eärwen knew was that what had eventually stopped Arafinwë was the prospect of bearing upon him the eternal curse and equally eternal enmity of the Valar if he did not quit his path and turn around. But she did not know what he had been thinking. She did not know if he had been contemplating returning even before then, and for the first time, the very first time, Eärwen wished so powerfully that wishing for it felt like dying, that she knew.

There were no words within her capable of forming the question. There was nothing within her at this moment that could have induced her mouth to move. Eärwen stood still, stood silent, and watched him.

His eyes were fixed upon a point far beyond the grounds of the palace—far beyond the bounds of Tirion or the hill upon which it stood, Eärwen suspected. He just stared out the cleft of the mountains, mouth pressed into a tightly line, eyes poring upon something so far out of reach that it must have seemed to him to have flown beyond the circles of the world.

She wanted him to see her. Eärwen did not wish to initiate a confrontation, but she _did_ wish for Arafinwë to develop the fire of sudden passion and violence that his brothers had possessed in such abundance and confront _her_. She wanted the confrontation. She wanted something to set her will against, wanted the words to be out in the air, wanted finally to just hear him say something, _anything_ that Eärwen could have used to make sense of his actions, even if those things were so utterly repugnant that she could never look at him again with anything but revulsion.

It was not fair, she would allow. Her feelings were all in tangles and she did not wish to broach the subject until she could make more sense of them. But she wanted what she wanted, regardless of whether it was fair. That was the doom of all things that lived, was it not? You want things regardless of whether they’re rational, regardless of whether it’s okay to want what you want.

Tonight, at least, there would be no confrontation. Eärwen could not unstick her mouth, and Arafinwë never noticed her standing there and watching him. The light dulled and dulled from the red of fresh blood to the rust of old blood (the blood Eärwen had seen in Alqualondë had never been old), and yet it did not touch him, yet it did not stain him. There was perhaps ten feet between them, and he was so far away that if Eärwen traveled beyond the circles of the world, she did not think they would be close enough to touch.

And whatever it was he was looking at, Eärwen could guess that he felt about it just as she felt about him.

She ought to reach out. She ought to at least _try_. But her arms were limp at her side. She was rendered the impotent observer, unable to influence events or thoughts. (Was this how the dead felt, when they watched the living? Was this how Míriel had felt when she had watched her son making himself the cause of so much strife?)

Eärwen did not regard Tirion as her home. She had returned for reasons that did not make much sense to her, but that was only sensible, since she had never really _asked_ herself why she was returning. Her _parents_ had asked, certainly, and her younger brothers had gone so far as to demand, but she was a grown woman and queen over another city, and they could not stop her.

Eärwen did not regard Tirion as her home. She did not know precisely what she had ever returned to it. Looking at her husband, she could see that he did not regard the halls in which they dwelled as his home. She was not certain he regarded even Tirion as his home.

-0-0-0-

Eärwen knew darkness. It had been a long time since she had last been obliged to deal with darkness in any true form, the sort of darkness that had only the faint twinkling of starlight to break it slightly—even when you traveled away from the cleft in the mountains, you could still see light shining over the mountaintops—but she did know darkness. Someone who knows darkness will never forget it, though they might live until the breaking of the world.

Eärwen knew darkness, and so, while the streets of Tirion were largely empty, she was unafraid to travel them, lantern in hand.

Elsewhere in the city, Fëanáro was stirring up trouble, as had long ago become his wont, and all of his kin were attending him, some agreeing and more no doubt vying against him. Eärwen would worry about that later. In time, she would learn how foolish it was to discount Fëanáro’s ability to stir up more trouble than the Blessed Realm could handle, but for now, she was not worrying about him.

Not when she had something else she needed to worry about.

Eärwen had remained in the house she shared with her husband and their children, but the rest of those who found themselves related to Finwë by either blood or by marriage had removed to the palace in the center of Tirion. Whenever she wanted something from one of them, she found that none of them were willing to walk out so far into the darkness as to come to her. Well, fine. She had a lantern, and the darkness did not hold the same horror for her as it did for them.

(Indis was another who did not regard the darkness in the same way as her children or grandchildren. But she would not leave them when they were in such distress, and thus, Eärwen could not bring herself to call upon her, to try to draw her away from her children, her grandchildren, from everyone who looked to her for guidance and strength.)

Eärwen was seeking one of her relatives by marriage in particular.

And as she did so, perhaps she did feel some trepidation, walking down deserted streets, where the buildings towered so tall that even with lanterns hanging from every hook, the streets were awash in shadow. Any people who might not have hearkened to Fëanáro’s call to come and listen to whatever tirade he had wound himself up to this time were cowering in their homes. The windows were bright, every lantern and candle and hearth lit, the better to do battle with this penetrating darkness, but Eärwen saw no faces in those windows. The only evidence of occupancy were tremulous shadows that cringed away from the light of _her_ lantern as she trekked ever further up the hill.

They were fearful, and though Eärwen was not so gripped by fear as to lie paralyzed in its embrace, she could feel it setting its hands upon her shoulders, anticipatory and demanding. She had known darkness. Darkness itself did not hold any true horror, but even as darkness was familiar to her, so too were the dangers that had lurked outside of the shelter of firelight. She had been raised on stories of naughty children who, upon straying too far from their parents’ sides, were carried off by nameless and formless monsters and were next seen as little wisps of light that made up only vaguely the forms they had once borne, to be used as bait to lure off yet more naughty children. She had been raised on stories of what became of Ellalië who were carried off to the distant and unforgiving north. She had been raised on tales of things that had lurked in the dark since time immemorial, things that even the Valar had no name for, for they had no idea from whence these things had come.

There were things in the dark that even the Valar could not account for. Eärwen had not the horror of the dark shared by those who had been born in what was once reckoned to be eternal night, but she was not ignorant. She was not heedless. If murder could be a part of life in this realm and the Trees could be despoiled and their light stolen, leaving the Ellalië with darkness, Eärwen did not think it wise to discount anything. What horrors had prowled the dark of Endóre could easily make their way west over the Sea, and snatch away as many people here as they pleased.

Struck silent and motionless as they had been, the Valar might well allow it to go unchallenged.

So, cautious but not paralyzed by fear, Eärwen made her way up the streets of Tirion, towards the center where all her worries were resting now. She did not run. She did not _dawdle._

There were no guards to bar her entry into the palace. Perhaps she should be worried by that, for if even the _guards_ were drawn off by Fëanáro, that did not bode well for how many of the Ñoldor were now clustered around him, listening to his words, however hasty and potent with rage they might be. But Eärwen was not thinking about such worry at this moment. She would not think to worry about it until later, when she learned that the hosts of the Ñoldor were advancing upon her own people. For now, she was worrying about something rather different. Some _one_ rather different.

_She never was comfortable with the idea of darkness._

_She was still crying, the last time I saw her._

Though earlier Eärwen’s mind had been thick with the imaginings of all the stories her parents had ever told her as a little child to make her be good and keep her from straying too far from their settlement, now, she was entertaining another, far more fantastical scene. She was wondering to herself if it was possible to actually drown in a sea of your own tears. Would you drown, or would you float, and be borne away, where no one could ever find you to comfort you and convince you to turn to something that was not the familiar, razor-sharp embrace of your own grief?

What if you, when others did come to find you and convince you to turn away from the endless mirrors of your own grief, only pushed them away and snapped at them that they did not truly understand the situation you were all in?

Eärwen was not expecting an easy time of it. She just hoped that it would not be so difficult as to be insurmountable.

Where she had found no guards at the gates, when she made her way into the house itself, she did at least find Indis, whose expression when their eyes met was…

Eärwen could not imagine what it was like to be the widow of the only man in the Blessed Realm ever to be murdered. She could have set her imagination to it with all the power she had, and she still thought her own power would have been insufficient to perform the task. Looking into Indis’s eyes, she was not certain that Indis could imagine what it was like to be the widow of the only man in the Blessed Realm ever to be murdered, either.

“You…” Indis’s voice was faint, like the whisper of one who had gone days with no water. Her mouth worked for several moments with nothing coming out. “You have returned. You had no trouble?”

Eärwen nodded slowly. “No trouble.” She looked past Indis to the staircase up to the second floor. “Anairë…”

“Here.” Indis blinked several times. When she spoke again, her voice was a little stronger. “Upstairs. I would not say that she is well, but I do think that she would like to see you, if you will have her.”

Eärwen nodded once more. Aye, she would have Anairë. She could do no less.

When she was upstairs, she found the corridors empty and all of the doors closed, but she was not entirely without recourse for finding Anairë. All she need do was follow the sound of crying.

_I had never heard her cry so much before. Even when Arakáno fell from a tree and hit his head, she did not cry so much._

And she was totally inconsolable. She would not go outside, would not consent to go into any chamber except one that was without windows, or one whose windows were girded with thick, sturdy curtains. The journey from Valmar to Tirion had already been a long one, groping about in the dark as they were, and Anairë’s hysterical panic, her utter, overpowering terror, had made the journey all the longer, for it would have been nothing short of cruel to force her to travel at best speed when that involved making their way through the dark with only the faintest of light. And since being returned to Tirion, Anairë had been taken straight to the palace, the most easily-defensible building in the city, in anticipation of…

Eärwen was not certain what it had been in anticipation of. She had had plenty of time to draw conclusions, but she had deliberately avoided doing as much. She had a feeling that if she started to draw conclusions, she would not have been able to stop. And where that road would have taken her, she did not care to find out. Eärwen was predisposed to at least _try_ not to worry about things outside of her control, but horrors in the dark out of all of her most terrifying childhood dreams emerging in the Blessed Realm and stalking Ellalië, the majority of whom had no experience of them and no idea how to fight them or ward them off, that might have been something beyond her power to influence, but it was something entirely too terrible to ignore. (Eärwen hated helplessness the way a claustrophobe hated being shut up in a closet. She could not help it.)

Well, Anairë had been taken to the palace, and now that she was here, she would not be budged. No matter how her husband, her children, or any of her other kin living in the city might beg, she would not leave, refusing even to leave the chamber she had been put into. She would not leave to see to the affairs of her household. She would not leave to retrieve her writing materials. She would not _write_. Eärwen suspected that the only reason she was even bathing was because someone had found a bathtub and dragged it into the chamber for her use.

What Anairë would do, indeed, what Eärwen suspected she had not stopped doing while wakeful for more than perhaps five minutes at a time since darkness descended over Valmar, was cry. And cry. And cry.

She was not alone in this, after all. Valmar, when the most terrible of the darkness had passed and the Ellalië could at least _stand_ again without finding their bodies pressed so tightly against the ground that they could barely even breathe, had been raucous with the sound of weeping. The screaming and wailing had followed the Ñoldor for miles out, at times drowning out Anairë entirely. And in Tirion, if you were to strain your hearing, you would still hear someone crying. Somewhere, someone was always crying. Not just Anairë; there were many who had found themselves locked in the grip of grief too terrible to endure.

Eärwen was not particularly straining her hearing, at this present moment. She could not hear what went on beyond the palace grounds. She could hear the muffled noises behind all the closed doors to her left and her right, and one of them, somewhere down the hall, was a series of snuffling, muffled sobs that pitched high and low like the moaning of the wind through trees made naked by winter’s bitter chill.

_What can I even say? My stories have been of no comfort to her. The only way I could bring an end to her tears would be if I had it in my power to raise Ninquelótë and Culúrien from the dead and fill the Blessed Realm with their light once more._

If she could do so, she would. Eärwen would like to say that her motives for doing so were for the welfare of all the Ellalië, but that would have been a lie. In this moment, if she found a way to raise the Trees from the dead and fill the land with their light once more, it would have been all for Anairë’s benefit. It would have all been to see Anairë dry her eyes and smile once more.

Such was beyond her power. She could only dream.

Eärwen found the door she was looking for, and stopped outside of it. She took a deep breath that was not enough to steel herself, and then, she knocked.

-0-0-0-

Eärwen had wondered how long she would have to wait before a new pamphlet hit the printing presses and was out for the public to read. As it happened, she had not had to wait long. She could not begin to guess how long these little booklets had been in the making. The Anairë she had known had constantly revised and revised and edited and edited, even if she would not tell Eärwen just what it _was_ that she was revising and revising and editing and editing. Eärwen did not know exactly what it was that went into revising and editing—truly, she’d never been much of a writer; the most she wrote were letters of correspondence to friends and loved ones—but she suspected it to be something that be long in the undertaking. _Very_ long, when it came to someone like Anairë.

And yet, this pamphlet arrived perhaps two months on the heels of the last one. It was of equal length to the last, and Eärwen could not help but think that, for it to be published now, either Anairë had been writing her pamphlets in advance, or else Anairë was writing, editing, and revising at breakneck speed, or else she was writing quickly and revising and editing not at all.

All of this was, perhaps, less concerning than the contents of the pamphlets themselves. The process of translating a work of writing from the words that jumbled together in your mind to something that was being published and disseminated to anyone who would read it was _far_ away from being the most concerning thing about this. But it served another purpose, and served that purpose well: for a time, it allowed Eärwen to be concerned about something that was not the content of the pamphlet itself.

She should not hide behind such things. They were distractions, and would not help her. But she did not have Anairë here to explain her writing process to Eärwen. Anairë was not here. Anairë had made a ghost of herself in the house she had once shared with her husband and their children, and was so averse to the idea of setting foot outside of it that she committed the delivery of her manuscripts to the publishers to a servant.

Or so Eärwen had heard, at least. Anairë was increasingly a figure of gossip and whispers in Tirion, and though Tirion itself was much reduced, the vast majority of its people gone over the Sea, the Ñoldor who had stayed behind remained _Ñoldor_. And Ñoldor, Eärwen had had plenty of time to learn, thrived on gossip.

What the people were saying of Anairë was perhaps better off not mentioned. Much of it was ridiculous, and even more of it offensive, at least to Eärwen, who knew better than anyone yet living in this city what Anairë was likely to do, and what she was likely _not_ to do.

Much of it was ridiculous, and even more of it offensive, but the more Eärwen read of Anairë’s published writings, the more she understood, however little she might wish for understanding, why there were some among the Aulendur who felt compelled to spread rumors and gossips regarding the elusive, reclusive Anairë.

“This is…” Arafinwë’s mouth twisted as he read the pamphlet over for himself. He flipped quickly through a few pages, his eyebrows picking up higher and higher, until by the time he had reached the end, they were within half an inch of touching his hairline. Then, he sighed heavily, slapping the pamphlet down on the table that stood between himself and Eärwen, and ran a hand through his hair. “I… Truth be told, I have been worried for a while. Now, I begin to feel that my worry has not been nearly urgent _enough_.”

Eärwen was thinking the same thing, regarding herself. If her worry upon reading this pamphlet had not been so acute, if her worry for _Anairë_ had not been so acute, she did not think that she would be here now. She did not think that she would be speaking to her husband now. She did not think that she would be making her appeal, even though she was yet incapable of regarding Arafinwë in anything but a light of intense ambivalence.

(She was still waiting for confrontation. He was still declining to give her one.)

They both stared down at the pamphlet left open upon the table, its pages gently quivering in a breeze caught upon them, courtesy of an open window.

Eärwen would never read it again. She had no desire. When we write, we are pouring out some truth of ourselves that we could never have shared with others in any way—even when ever word committed to the parchment was a lie, there was still some underlying truth that shone through, in spite of all efforts to obfuscate it.

Some truths, Eärwen thought, were too private to be shared. Yet other truths might or might not be too private to be shared—indeed, if not shared, they would turn from truth to poison, and murder the one who bore that truth without a word, without having to lift a finger.

Some truths, when revealed, could threaten to break the world. This was not on that level, not yet, but it was something that, if pressed upon, if persisted upon, could threaten to break the fragile peace between the Aulendur and the rest of the Blessed Realm.

(Eärwen had never heard that Anairë bore any gift of prophecy. She had kept her ears open for it, after the first time she had occasion to read one of her pamphlets. Eärwen had heard nothing yet regarding the existence or non-existence of that gift. She had yet to hear of someone who was not gifted with foresight speaking with such conviction of the future.)

Eärwen was not certain why she was here, but she was still queen over these people. There were certain things she owed them, and helping to ensure that they did not fall afoul of the Valar not least among them.

_‘And to those who persist in wickedness, the Valar will cast into darkness everlasting, into the Void beyond the Gates of Night, and all their pleas and wails shall not avail them, for the Valar will close their hearts and their minds against them, and repent not, and hearken not. Accursed shall be the wicked in this land of darkness, for the dangers that dog us shall be too great for wickedness to be met with mercy.’_

Would that she could have denied it, but Eärwen recognized Anairë’s turns of phrase. She recognized her conviction, stubborn and unrelenting. If she concentrated, she could practically hear Anairë reading it out in her own voice.

“I have left this alone too long,” Arafinwë fretted, tossing his head like an anxious horse. “I should have intervened long ago.”

He was not the only one.

-0-0-0-

“Further? Really?”

“ _Really_ , Anairë. There is nothing to fear, trust me. I have never known Uinen to allow any of us to drown when we give ourselves over to her domain.” In Endóre, drowning deaths had not been entirely unheard of, even those of the strongest swimmers among the Lindar, but better not to tell Anairë of that. If Eärwen told Anairë of that, Anairë would go stomping back to the shore that instant, regardless of Eärwen’s wish.

(Truth be told, Eärwen did not particularly wish to remember those drowning deaths, herself. There had been a time when she was a child when she was making a sandcastle by the shore, all by herself, and something flopped up in the water. She had watched it with curiosity, thinking it at first to be a particularly large bit of driftwood—it had the right color, a sort of waterlogged gray. But as it got closer to the shore, she could see that it did not have the right consistency of driftwood, could see that its consistency was softer, more pliant. And then, as it came closer still to the sands on which she sat, she began to pick up a smell, a sickly-sweet stench that would never leave her memory for as long as she lived…)

The Convincing of Anairë (and yes, Eärwen did think that ‘convincing’ warranted a capitalized ‘c’) had been a year in the making. Eärwen had employed many methods by which to convince Anairë to return to Alqualondë with her the next time Eärwen made a visit to Tirion. She had gone down to the seashore and picked up the choicest gems and pearls to send back to Anairë in packages carefully-enough wrapped that Anairë would not realize what was inside until she opened the package for herself. She had taken down books of sheet music and sent them on to Anairë to peruse for herself, to see if she would like the Lindar’s music herself (Eärwen was reasonably confident that Anairë would at least be _curious_ , considering how different Lindarin music was from the music of the Ñoldor or the Vaniai). She had located a few especially fine specimens of the craftsmanship of Alqualondë’s silversmiths. As the finishing touch, she had written Anairë a letter, telling her—truthfully; Eärwen did not take their relationship lightly enough to try to lure Anairë to Alqualondë on false pretenses—that there were many books in the archives that were unique accounts of the Lindar’s experiences in Endóre, both on the way west to the Sea, and while they had yet dwelled by Cuiviénen, and had no intention yet of leaving.

It was that last one that had finally convinced Anairë that a trip to Alqualondë would not be a wasted errand. Anairë had never _told_ Eärwen that it was the last that had convinced her, but Eärwen _knew_ her. She did not have to be told.

Anairë, Eärwen knew, had not come here for love of the Sea, had not come here out of a pressing desire to see the Sea for herself. But every one of the Ellalië should see the Sea, should know it for themselves. Even if their dwellings were far from it, even if their business rarely took them to the seaside, they should know the Sea. They should know water as they knew themselves.

Anairë was going to be here for a while. While she was here, Eärwen would make certain that Anairë had plenty of time to do the things that had drawn her to Alqualondë in the first place. That was only fair, and frankly was only pragmatic—if Anairë spent an entire two months in Alqualondë without being able to do _anything_ that she wanted to do, Eärwen didn’t think much of her chances of ever convincing Anairë to return.

Later, they would return to the city proper and Eärwen would gladly accompany Anairë back into the dim, dusty archive she had dragged Anairë away from. Doubtless, Anairë would be more comfortable there than she was out here. But Eärwen could not have passed up the opportunity. The already typically-tranquil waters off the shores of the Blessed Realm were especially peaceful at this time—perfect for someone who was an unsteady swimmer, and had never been in the Sea before.

Not that there was going to be any swimming being done right now. Eärwen had offered Anairë her hand after the water reached Anairë’s knees, and Anairë had latched onto it tightly, her grip just shy of painful, and she had not for a single, solitary moment, seemed to have contemplated the idea of letting _go_ of Eärwen’s hand.

Later, perhaps, they could swim. After Anairë had had lessons in swimming more strongly in a pool or a pond or somewhere the water did not ebb and flow, perhaps. (Or perhaps there would not be enough time, and Anairë would not be amenable in the meantime.) For now, Eärwen could content herself with wading. Even wading out into the Sea saw the water pressing itself against her skin, saw the Sea welcoming her into its many-armed and multi-legged embrace. Even wading out into the Sea, Eärwen could hear the song it sang to those who strained their ears to hear.

She cast a glance Anairë’s way, eyes lingering on the way Anairë’s face was scrunched up against the salty wind. It might take a little longer before she could coach Anairë on how to listen for that song, as well.

“Well,” Eärwen called to her over the wind, when they had gotten to the point where the water was up just a bit past Anairë’s waist, “how do you feel?”

“Cold and wet,” was the immediate reply. “We aren’t going to go out any further, are we?”

Eärwen laughed, uncaring of the pinched, unappreciative look this earned her. “Just a little further, Anairë. There is something I wish to show you.”

“And what is that?”

“You’ll see,” Eärwen told her with a blithe smile. “You’ll see.”

And Anairë did see, soon enough. The water that been up just past her waist started to get shallower and shallower, Anairë staring down at it in frank confusion, until they were mounting a sandbar where the water was so shallow that it did not even touch the tops of their feet and the sand glittered in the little glints of golden light that spilled out through the cleft in the mountains.

“I should have picked a time when the tide was lower,” Eärwen remarked ruefully. “Then the sand would have been totally exposed. I suppose I should just be glad no one else has decided to come out here today; this is usually a popular spot for people to come down and lie on.”

“Well, I am tired,” Anairë declared, “and _I_ shall sit down upon it.”

And she did just that, plopping down on the wet sand with a squelch, rubbing her hands against her thighs, sighing the deep sigh of someone who was _not_ looking forward to getting back up and wading back through the water to reach the shore.

Eärwen regarded her with some amusement, but that amusement was quickly cut with relief. If Anairë had tried to wade back out into the water, if she’d rejected this and gone to sit on dry sand, alone…

Well, it was certainly not what Eärwen had intended. Certainly not what she had _wanted_.

 _I likely have Anairë’s being easily tired to thank,_ she acknowledged ruefully. _Certainly, that must be more compelling than_ this _could have been._

Eärwen settled down beside Anairë, staring out into the fathomless Sea that peeked out beyond Tol Eressëa to their right. Where the Sea met the sky, the stars rose from the depths like jewels hung in a canvas painted a black so dark it began to look blue.

This sight, surely, Anairë must appreciate. Anairë’s love of gold and silver skies was well-known to Eärwen, especially when that gold and silver came together—it was hardly a controversial view to love the time of the Mingling the most of any time of day, but Eärwen at least knew _why_ it was so uncontroversial to love the Mingling most. But even Anairë, lover of silver and gold and endless, ineffable light, loved also the stars. All the Ellalië loved the stars. Anairë loved the stars, and you could not see them from Tirion. Within the cradle of the mountains, you needed to ascend the highest peaks of Taniquetil you could stand to mount to find the stars, and even then, you would not have long to enjoy them, for the air was thin that high, and you had to make the descent quickly if you did not want to suffocate or experience all of the other things that could happen to you at such altitudes.

(Within the cradle of the mountains, the only people who could truly see the stars were the Ainur. They were the only ones with sight sharp enough to see the stars from the ground, past the veils of gold and silver. They were the only ones capable of surmounting the absolutely highest peaks of Taniquetil without the thin air affecting them in any way. The Ellalië loved the stars above all other things of beauty in this world. The Ellalië loved the stars above all else, and sometimes? Sometimes, Eärwen wondered why it was that the Valar had insisted upon them coming to a land where the stars were so hard to find in the sky. She knew that they had intended for the Lindar to come within the bounds of the mountains. She knew that the Lindar’s insistence on living outside of the mountains had come as a surprise. The Ellalië loved the stars above all else, for it had been their first sight of beauty within a dark land. Why they should be cut off from the stars, why the Valar would _want_ to cut them off from the stars, Eärwen did not know.)

Well, it was not so easy to see the stars in Tirion or in Valmar, but here, out here on the shores of the fathomless Sea, the stars were yours for the seeing. All you need do was tip your head up and look. They were not veiled from your sight. You did not have to go climbing up a mountain to see them. They were just there. Eärwen did not think that it was a coincidence that most of the Ñoldor and the Vaniai who had made the study of the stars their careers took their studies to Alqualondë, rather than to Tirion or to Valmar.

Judging by the way Anairë was staring up at the sky, now, perhaps she would return. Her pale blue eyes were fixed raptly upon the delicately twinkling stars hung so high up in the sky, her mouth softening into something that was not a smile, but was more relaxed than many of the smiles Eärwen had seen grace her mouth. Looking at her looking at the stars, it was not so difficult to imagine that Anairë would wish to return again someday. Perhaps someday soon. Eärwen would like that.

The minutes passed by in an easy, balmy silence, punctuated by the wind, the surf, the cries of seagulls and swans that, knowing swans, were likely causing some trouble for the beachgoers still on the shore. There was a faint glimmer off far to the left below the surface of the water, but Eärwen could not tell if it was Uinen, Ossë, or another Maia enjoying the mild condition of the waters. (Granted, it was probably not Ossë, because she had _never_ known Ossë to well and truly enjoy mild waters, but there was a first time for everything.)

Eärwen was not one of those who had ever spent much time trying to make constellations out of the individual stars. She enjoyed the stars _as_ individual stars, and did not try to make shapes out of them. But she had found that, when you wanted to make an idle game out of forming shapes out of the stars, it was better not to know much about the constellations. When you did not know much about the constellations that most astronomers agreed on nowadays, you had a much easier time constructing shapes of your own designs in the stars.

Granted, Eärwen found that she just kept making fish out of the patterns of the stars, but the stars glittered as beautifully as fish scales, so it wasn’t as though the image presented was totally _inaccurate_.

What Anairë thought when she looked at the stars, Eärwen could not imagine. Perhaps she looked at them and felt a reverence for that which had been the first thing that any of the Ellalië had seen. Perhaps she looked at them and saw fodder for whatever it was that she was constantly writing at her desk in Tirion. Perhaps she was pondering just what the stars were made of; they looked to Eärwen’s eyes like jewels, but she had never known jewels to give off their own light in such a fashion. Perhaps she was doing just as Eärwen was doing, and trying to make her own constellations out of the positioning of the stars. If Anairë was doing the latter, Eärwen could only suspect that Anairë saw birds in the patterns of the stars, rather than fish.

But Anairë was likely not trying to make her own constellations out of the stars. To someone like Anairë, Eärwen suspected that such an idea might have seemed at least mildly sacrilegious.

Whatever Anairë was thinking when she looked up at the stars, Eärwen knew that the thoughts must be tinged with a longing so palpable as to be tasted on the roof of her mouth. Her expression was just an expression of that kind.

And when Anairë tore her eyes away, perhaps it was with the knowledge that longing was not the same as being able to have, and perhaps even that longing was better than having. That having would take the luster off of longing, that to have something was to eventually forget why you longed for it in the first place.

Eärwen knew that feeling. She smiled wistfully at the side of Anairë’s head. She knew that feeling very well.

Beside her, Anairë nodded choppily, sucking in a deep breath that sounded incongruously like a sob, though there was no trace of the sort of distress that should have accompanied a sob in her face. And that noise was gone soon enough, drowning in the roar of the Sea. “I think,” she murmured, so softly that Eärwen could only interpret the words by discerning the shapes made by her mouth, “that I would like to return here tomorrow, if the weather is fair.”

“Of course.” Relief flared in Eärwen’s chest like a fire. “I’ll wake you when the tide is low, so the trek to this sandbar is less exhausting for you.”

Anairë grimaced. “Yes, I would like that; thank you. But for now, I have things to attend to in the city. Shall we go?”

Still a Ñoldo, still one of the Vaniai; Eärwen knew few among the Lindar who would have so quickly torn themselves away from the embrace of the Sea. But Anairë would not have been herself had she been anything else. Anairë would not have wanted her to be any other way but this.

“I suppose we must. There are things I must attend to, as well.”

Regretfully, Eärwen rose to her feet. Anairë tried to scrub the sand from her legs, but Eärwen did not bother. They’d be covered in it again by the time they made their way up the dunes to the city, and when you walked through Alqualondë, you quickly noticed that at least half of the people you passed on the streets had arms and legs covered in sand. Anairë would realize that herself, eventually. Whether it would be enough to convince her to stop trying to brush the sand off of herself was another matter entirely.

Eärwen offered Anairë her hand, and tried not to be too pleased with the speed with which Anairë took it. “Will you promise to ensure that I am not carried off by the water?” Anairë asked, and the thin little arch of her eyebrow was not quite enough to tell Eärwen if she was being serious or not.

“Always, Anairë,” Eärwen returned with a ready smile. “Always. I won’t let anything carry you out of reach.”

-0-0-0-

She had promised that, once. Eärwen had promised it so easily, and never thought there would be an occasion to be called to account for it. After all, this was the Blessed Realm, where no peril could ever touch.

But Eärwen’s conception of the Blessed Realm had been flawed. The power of the Valar was great beyond the conception of the Ellalië, so far beyond Eärwen’s ken that she could not begin to guess at all that they were capable of—how was she ever supposed to sufficiently and accurately describe the power of those who had played such a large role in the shaping and the creation of their world?—but the power of the Valar was not without its limit. There were things that could set their might against them and prevail.

Eärwen had never imagined that. She had never considered it, not even for a moment. Whoever would? But that had been the world that had become theirs: a world where the most prized creations of Yavanna Kementári could be murdered and their corpses defiled, a world where the light that had been so prized and cherished by Ainur and Ellalië alike could be plunged into darkness without end or mercy. A world where people could be murdered within the confines of the Blessed Realm, and their grieving sons could murder innocent people in turn for their most cherished belongings.

This was the world that was hers. She could not have that other world back: it must sink into golden, musty nostalgia, where it was within sight but forever out of the reach of her hands. She could never have any of it back, no matter how she longed for it.

Eärwen had gone seeking Alqualondë for so many reasons that to list them all would have taken the rest of the year. She could not stand living in a city that hosted the kin of her own kin’s murderers, just like she couldn’t stand looking at the mournful faces of the Ñoldor who had been left behind by their kin, just like she could not stand any longer to be away from her parents and her brothers, just like she could not stand the sight of Tirion so altered by darkness, just like she was drawn in by the idea that if she went to Alqualondë, it would feel less like the whole world had been so violently changed, for if she simply did not look towards the cleft in the mountains, she could pretend that all was as it had been before darkness had descended over Valmar, before Moringotto had made the journey in the dark to Formenos.

The world could never go back to that. It had been foolish to pretend, even for a moment, that it could. But Eärwen had spent years upon years in a state of half-denial, returning to the place of her childhood and acting as if they had come to Endóre once more, in spite of the Sea being to her east rather than her west, in spite of the fact that first Isil, than Anar, appeared on the horizon, the works of the Aulendur and Aulë and Tilion and Arien.

Perhaps she finally had an answer for why she had returned: there was only so long you could live with the illusion of a lost, shattered world, before the shards of that shattered world began to cut your skin so badly that you could no longer ignore it. You could only cling to a shattered world so long before the embrace became too painful to cling to it any longer. Sooner or later, you had to take your head out of the sand. No matter how much you did not want to.

Perhaps Eärwen was not as strong of a person as she had thought she was. But she was strong enough to take her head out of the sand. She was strong enough to admit when the embrace of a lost and shattered world had become painful and something she could no longer endure.

Now, she had to be strong enough to admit that she had broken a promise she had made long ago, even if she had made it lightly, even if she had made it partially in jest, even if Anairë herself hadn’t seemed to take it all that seriously at the time. Eärwen had made the promise, and then she had broken it. Anairë _had_ been carried off, and what had carried her off had come from within her own mind.

Eärwen could not have stopped it. But she should have _been_ here, she should have—

No. She could not change the past. She could only look forward, and fulfill what she had promised to fulfill.

“I’m going over there,” Eärwen told Arafinwë firmly, chancing one last glance at the pamphlet before deciding that she did not want to look at it, ever again.

While at other times she had hungered for confrontation, it was fortuitous circumstance now that Arafinwë was uninclined to give her one. Instead, he nodded in turn. “I will go with you.” He shook his head, regret flashing through his eyes, for one moment as intense as Anar at noontide. “I should have gone myself, long ago.”

Perhaps he should have, but Eärwen should have gone even earlier than that, and she hadn’t. This was no time to be casting blame.

But it was time for Eärwen to shake her head. “I think it should be just me.” When Arafinwë opened his mouth to protest, she went on, “You know Anairë. You know her almost as well as I do. If we both go together, she’ll get defensive. To her, two against one isn’t just a confrontation; it’s an attack.”

Arafinwë… did not look convinced by that. Now, _now_ , Eärwen could see something of what had drawn her in in the first place, that stubborn refusal not to help, that stubborn refusal not to _care_. Would that she could indulge that, would that she could _encourage_ that, but not right now, not right now.

“I… I’m sorry, Arafinwë, but please, I need you to stay here. Could you get a room ready for her? I think she’s going to need it.”

 _I am not letting her live alone in that house anymore, all the curtains shut, her eyes shut to both darkness and light, her mind shut to the world around her,_ went unsaid, but Eärwen thought Arafinwë could hear it, anyways. She wanted to believe that he could hear it.

And perhaps he could hear it, could hear it even without looking into a mind that would have been open to him for the first time in years, for Arafinwë nodded again, more firmly now. “I’ll fetch you a lock pick. You may need that, as well.”

Yes, Eärwen might need a lock pick. But she’d get to Anairë now even if she had to scale the walls, even if she had to break down the gate, even if she had to cross the threshold of the Houses of the Dead. After everything else, she could do no less.

-0-0-0-

So once again, Eärwen found herself standing outside of a dark house, searching the curtained windows for any sign of a pale face or the glint of a blue eye or the motion of a slender hand upon the lace. Nothing. There was nothing, and she could have spent the rest of the day, the rest of the week, the rest of the month, the rest of the _year_ searching for it, and never found a sign. Now was not the time to stand still and wait for the world to right itself without any input from her. Now was the time to step forward, and take responsibility.

Now was the time to step forward, and offer a hand again.

The gate wasn’t locked. The hinges screeched like dying birds as Eärwen pushed it inwards, but the gate still yielded to her touch. And as she passed through the gate and got her first good look at the grounds leading up to the steps into the house, Eärwen got her first, long look at exactly what sort of state the house had fallen into.

When Eärwen had visited this house when it was bathed by gold and silver light, the grounds had always been immaculately kept. Anairë and Ñolofinwë were both such tidy people, and they had always been very particular about the sort of state their house and the grounds of their house should be kept in. The grass was always short and neat. Every bush had been immaculately trimmed, every tree had been carefully inspected for dead branches on a regular basis, every flowerbed was weeded on a _daily_ basis, and the stone walkways were always being looked over for any sign of weeds growing up through the cracks. Every time Eärwen had visited the house, she could have sworn that it had been freshly constructed, for there were none of the signs of wear that you would have expected from grounds that were actually lived in and lived on by a growing family.

Not everything was clearly visible at the moment. Clouds had come up from the south and passed over the face of Anar, thick and gray, presaging a rainstorm perhaps later in the afternoon, or after night had fallen. Much of the grounds were in shadow, and there were distant corners that Eärwen could not claim to have a clear, unobstructed view of. But what she could see painted a stark picture all on its own.

Dead leaves crunched under Eärwen’s feet as she slowly made her way down a stone walkway overgrown with weeds and moss. The rhododendron bushes were grown so high that they half-obscured all of the windows on the ground floor, even though the house itself was raised perhaps seven feet from the ground. The grounds were littered with dead branches whose grasping limbs reached up towards the sky in a gesture that Eärwen could not decide to herself if it looked more like a supplication, or a threat. They… If it was supposed to be any sort of reflection of Anairë herself, she supposed it could have been either one. Could have been both at once. The grass grew tall and long past the dead branches, except for the long, snaking patches of it that were dead and brown and supine upon the ground.

Eärwen took one, long look at it all, and then hurried up the walkway. There would be time later to wonder just why, just _how_ it was that the grounds had been allowed to fall into such disrepair. This was not her greatest concern. What it was was an oracle of what she was likely to find inside.

 _‘Do we know for certain she yet lives?_ '

Eärwen’s stomach churned as she neared the mossy steps covered in dead leaves and other detritus, remembering those words spoken in bitter jest weeks ago, when things had still seemed serious, but not as dire as they seemed to her now. If she could go back in time to that day those weeks ago, and do one thing to her past self, she thought she would have slapped her, even if she had to carry the bruise on her own body. Arafinwë had _said_ that servants came and went from the house, but that did not necessarily mean anything regarding _Anairë’s_ well-being, now did it? For all she knew, there could be a desiccated corpse hanging out of a desk chair upstairs, while all of the servants just went about their day like nothing was wrong, because if they actually went out and _admitted_ Anairë was dead, then they would have to find somewhere else to live, and find a new job for themselves. Alright, so it was more likely that the servants would have just gone out and admitted Anairë was dead, but the mind _wandered_ when it encountered stress.

The door was… in much the same state as the front gate, actually. The hinges screeched like something dying violently, but the door was not locked, and gave when Eärwen put pressure upon it.

And then, just like that, she was inside.

Eärwen saw no sign of any of the servants. Perhaps they were in the kitchens, or perhaps in the cellar, or perhaps they were out back of the house trying to do something, _anything_ about the unkempt grounds. But Eärwen stared into a house where sunlight was not allowed to enter, and where no candles or lamps had been lit, where there was no fire burning in the nearest hearth, and she stared into a dark, empty, dusty house that did not look as if it had been lived in in years. There were sheets thrown over the furniture, and the still, stale air was so thick with dust that as Eärwen made her way towards the staircase, she paused to cough and sneeze so many times that she quickly lost count, quickly stopped seeing any point in _trying_ to count. The more she saw of the house when it was in this condition, the harder her heart pounded in her chest, her agitated mind demanding that she look and listen to every last thing she encountered, for the house was so altered that if the staircase had not been in the place she had last left it, she did not think she would have known this place at all.

_What sort of state must she be in, to have allowed the house to fall to such disrepair?_

_I should have come here far sooner._

_I should never have left._

Eärwen’s footsteps on the staircase were so much louder than she could remember from the last time she had had occasion to mount the stairs to the second floor of Anairë’s house. They rang out so loudly, the echo so stark upon her ears, that she occasionally had to look behind her to be certain that there was not someone following her up the stairs. The house was…

Eärwen’s house in Tirion had been an oftentimes-rowdy place—Angaráto and Aikanáro had been loud children and louder adults—and this house, even more so. Between Turukáno and Findekáno and _especially_ Írissë and Arakáno, this house had never been quite as quiet as Anairë would have liked to be able to get in an optimal amount of writing in any one given day. This had been a place of noise and conversation, of music and shouting, and to find it so deathly silent, the only noises the ones she put out herself, carried a wrongness with it almost as intense as the wrongness of the darkness that had flooded over the land as the light of the Trees failed.

Eärwen came to the second floor, found it drenched in shadow and all of the doors firmly shut. She listened for voices, and heard none. She looked for light under the doors, and the only light she saw was the sort of light that could come from sunlight on a cloudy day, and filter through windows that had all of the curtains drawn over them.

…With all of the doors shut like this, Eärwen could not remember which one opened to Anairë’s study. Well, it seemed as if she would have to go searching. Best get started on opening all of those doors.

All of the doors were unlocked, at least, and opened upon bedchambers whose furniture had been draped in white sheets as the furniture downstairs had been, upon closets that had clearly been left untouched since the children of the house had last been present here, upon what Eärwen knew had once been a sitting room but was now completely empty, upon a bathroom that was spotlessly clean but looked as if it was not being used very often. Eärwen searched and searched, turning the corner to looking down the corridor that she knew formed the back of the house. Still, she saw no one, and as with the hallway she had entered the second floor upon, all the doors here were shut.

But somewhere, somewhere in the corridor, when Eärwen strained her hearing, she could hear someone sighing.

Treading carefully was important. If Anairë was here, if _that_ was Anairë and Eärwen’s mind was not playing tricks and making sighs out of gusts of wind impacting against the side of the house, well, Eärwen _knew_ Anairë. Knew how constructive it would be to startle her—or how unconstructive, that was. There could be no trying of every single door, no pushing each door open to see what sights they held for her.

Eärwen came to stand in the middle of the corridor, and waited.

And waited.

Just as she was beginning to think that perhaps she would have to start trying the doors after all, she heard another sigh. It was so very faint, so faint that she could almost believe that she had imagined it, but there was a certain cadence to it that was unmistakable as anything but Anairë’s voice.

And it had come from very close by.

Heart in her throat, Eärwen surged towards the door, shoving it open and putting a foot through the door before she had enough time to think about what she was doing.

Anairë jolted up from her desk as if expecting an assassin, knocking an inkwell to the floor with a tinkle of shattering glass.

For a moment, a long moment, Eärwen could do nothing but stare at her, stock-still a footstep past the doorway, eyes open wide, mouth agape. Anairë looked…

Well, Eärwen supposed it could have been worse. It could always have been worse.

The question of whether Eärwen was going to find a desiccated corpse when she found Anairë had solved itself, and for the second time it struck her just what a ridiculous question it had been to ask herself in the first place. The idea of servants just letting everyone believe that their dead mistress was still alive was such a ridiculous thing to imagine, especially in a place like _Tirion_. (And perhaps, if gold and silver light still reigned overhead, she would never have envisioned it in the first place.) That Eärwen had entertained it for even a moment was something that, if she shared it with Anairë, she could easily guess would have elicited rolled eyes and maybe a derisive laugh.

Or maybe it would have elicited such sometime long ago. Eärwen didn’t think it would have now.

Anairë was no desiccated corpse, no lurid display of rot and decay and death. No, what she looked a lot more like was a ghost bound to her writing desk, doomed never to stray more than a few feet from it. Slight and slender to start with, Anairë was grown markedly thinner, her long dress hanging loosely off of her body. There was little light in the room, the curtains drawn over the window and the single candle on the writing desk guttering low, a pool of golden wax bubbling gently in the bobèche, but there was enough light for Eärwen to discern that Anairë’s fair skin was grown pallid, that her hair, still combed neatly in spite of all else, was grown brittle and dull as though it had been washed only with hard soap and nothing else. There were deep circles under her eyes—whether born from sleeplessness or dehydration or something else, Eärwen could not imagine, but whatever had caused them, they were deep and dark and clung to the skin like fresh bruises. A vein was twitching in Anairë’s jaw, hopping more violently than Eärwen had ever seen it, even in the worst of Anairë’s past agitations. The expression of her eyes was totally beyond anything Eärwen had expected, wide and uncomprehending and slightly glazed.

Her hands were twitching too, the left fisting in her skirt, white-knuckled, while she flexed the fingers of her right as if searching for a pen in the middle of the open air. Anairë’s glassy gaze drifted over to the shattered remains of the inkwell on the floor, where pitch black ink slowly spread across the floor like a liquefied sample of black mold from one of Eärwen’s mother’s laboratories. Anairë stared at the spilling ink, and her expression shifted into something Eärwen much more readily recognized: embarrassment at the idea of a mess unfolding before the eyes of a guest.

But even that was borderline-nonsensical, for the rest of the room? No, the rest of the room was _not_ what anyone could call a shining example of cleanliness.

Torn shreds of parchment littered the dusty floor, and yet more sheets of parchment left whole were lying on the floor beneath and to the sides of the writing desk. There was a chair in the far corner of the room, and however much that corner of the room might be drowned in shadow, Eärwen was still possessed of the sharp eyes of the Ellalië—she could easily discern the towering stack of books that made that poor chair creak under its weight. There was a small couch set to the left of the room, presumably for napping, though Eärwen had never known Anairë to nap, and perhaps she was not napping upon it, for even this was bedecked with parchment. A single glass water goblet sat empty in the middle of the floor, abandoned for reasons Eärwen could not begin to fathom. The air was thick and stale, carrying with it a sour undertone of sweat.

 _No, I am definitely_ not _letting her stay here any longer._

And perhaps Anairë had heard that thought cross Eärwen’s mind, for she promptly took a seat at her desk, staring up at Eärwen with a raised-eyebrow, tetchy expectancy that would have been so familiar, if not for the faint hollows in her cheeks and the fact that her hands would simply not stop twitching.

“You’re…” Eärwen could not restrain a wince when Anairë spoke. Her voice was not so far off in tone from the front gate and the front door of the house, something rusty that could not decide whether to be totally silent or to screech. Anairë cleared her throat and turned to the writing desk, groping around for something—a glass of water, Eärwen could only assume. But the only glass of water sat empty on the floor, and Anairë eventually gave up her search, clearing her throat once more before asking, barely audibly, “Why are you here?”

Eärwen stepped forward. Her arms itched to pull Anairë up from the table and into an embrace, but as she drew closer, Anairë stiffened, her shoulders going rigid and her hands tight upon the edge of the desk. Her mouth twisted in something very like a scowl, her eyes locked upon Eärwen’s hands in frank suspicion, though there was something else behind the suspicion, something shifting and frenetic and terribly, terribly bright.

Eärwen did not dare to guess at what that something behind the suspicion was. A host of possibilities clamored for attention in her mind, each of them more unbearable than the last (though some tasted sweet as honey on her lips, and others bitter as ash), and so long as she could not pin one down with any certainty, she could not risk the temptation of touch. She could see Anairë’s shoulders begin to quiver, covered in cloth though they might be, and she could imagine her arms and legs and back just locking up, her jaw set, her entire body rebelling against touch. Eärwen could imagine such an embrace hurting far more than the embrace of a shattered world ever could, and that the pain would infect them both was no consolation. It was only reason more why she should not advance.

She must convince with words. She could only convince with words.

So Eärwen opened her mouth, and began to grope for the words that could ever possibly convince.

“Yes,” she murmured, fighting to keep her words from dropping to a whisper. “Yes, Anairë, I am here. I have heard that you are not doing well.”

She had read that Anairë was treading dangerous waters. She had read that Anairë was treading in territory that could bring down the scrutiny of the Valar upon her. She had read all of it, and known that she must find some way to bring a stop to it before any of the Ainur decided that Anairë’s writings were on a level with the turmoil that Fëanáro had brought down on Tirion, once what felt like an eternity ago.

The matter of convincing Anairë to turn her quill to different topics might have to wait for a different time, though. Getting Anairë out of this house seemed a far more pressing matter.

“You…” Anairë reached absently for a quill. She did not turn and write, at least, but she ran her fingers over the soft fibers of the feather like Eärwen had once watched her stroke Findekáno’s hair when Anairë’s eldest son was yet very young. “Well.” She pursed her lips. “I am uncertain as to where you would have heard such a thing. I have received no visitors in some time, and the servants of the house have never been wont to gossip; I should think I would have noticed if that had ever changed.”

If the circumstances were different, Eärwen thought she would have contested that point. Spiritedly, even, since she would be very surprised if Anairë had even been fully cognizant of the passing of years, locked away in this dark, shadowy, musty house, like a ghost wandering a crypt in Endóre. She was not certain what sort of ground she was treading on. (She was starting to get an idea, and did not care for it.) She would not contest the point just yet.

“I do not need to hear it from anyone to know when you aren’t doing well, Anairë.” Gentling her voice carried with it its own risks, risking Anairë choosing to ignore the point, risking Anairë’s hackles rising, but there was little else Eärwen could do. She could not bear to go the other way. “No one has seen you outside of this house in _years_. That is all I needed to know.”

Anairë’s mouth pinched hard, quivering for a moment into a frown, before reassuming an expression of stark, stubborn neutrality. “Well.” Her tone, on the other hand, carried a chill that would have been more appropriate to winter than the warmth outside. “I am happy for your concern,” in a tone that did not speak of happiness at all.

And truthfully, her voice had hardened into such a clang upon ‘concern,’ that Eärwen knew. She just knew.

_I waited entirely too long._

_I know that._

_She knows that just as well as I do._

Regret pricked the roof of Eärwen’s mouth like she had swallowed a hundred needles. She could yet remember Anairë’s muttered explanation to her, flat and almost dead-sounding, after the main host had left Tirion, head through the cleft in the mountains towards the coast: she had stayed here for her. It had seemed such a small thing in the midst of so much turmoil, and Eärwen had had so much else to contend with that it had soon slipped her mind. She had been so wrapped up in Arafinwë’s departure, in her children’s departure. She’d not thought about this at all.

_‘I stayed for you.’_

And then, Eärwen had not stayed for Anairë.

She could remember later all the reasons she had left Tirion behind her. She could remember the revulsion at the thought of staying in the same city as the kin of her own kin’s murderers. She could remember her desperation to see again what remained of her family. She could remember her desire to return to a place that had always felt like her shelter, could remember her overpowering desire to return to a place where darkness abated only by starlight did not feel so unnatural. She could remember later that she had longed to hear again the ever-comforting song of the Sea.

For now, what she remembered was that she had not tried to take Anairë to Alqualondë with her. She could remember that she had never visited Anairë in Tirion, had never tried to elicit visits of Anairë’s own to the city by the Sea. She could remember that she had never written Anairë any letters. She could remember all of the days, weeks, months that had gone by when she had barely thought of Anairë at all, so wrapped up was she in her own grief.

Here was someone else wrapped up in her own grief. Eärwen’s grief was a tangle so vast and so snarled that she did not know how she was ever to unravel it all, but if she could find the string to pull in Anairë’s, if she could just get Anairë _out of here_ to somewhere she would be with people who loved her and did not indulge this intense seclusion…

“I am sorry I did not come sooner.” The words came so much more easily than Eärwen had ever hoped they would. She wanted to believe that that was to her credit, but she thought it might just be that her own guilt was so happy to have an outlet that it would let the words come out of her mouth as easily as if her throat had been greased. “I wish I could say that I was bogged down with duties in Alqualondë, but that would be a lie. Once I married Arafinwë, my brothers took over many of my duties in Alqualondë, and when we dwelled there, we lived like guests in the house of my parents, free of most of the troubles that come with being part of the government of such a large city. When I returned to live in Alqualondë on a full-time basis, my brothers did not relinquish to me the duties that had once been mine. I was often at loose ends. I could have come to you. I did not. I am sorry.”

And for a moment, the hard, brittle mask of Anairë’s face cracked, her mouth wobbling and her eyes growing so bright that it could almost be as though the light of the Trees was truly alive once more, and housed within her eyes. Just for a moment, but the moment lasted long enough and was intense enough that Eärwen felt again the urge, almost entirely overpowering, to seize Anairë by her shoulders and fold her in the crooks of her arms.

But it was only a moment. Anairë ducked her head, picking at the shaft of her quill with a single chipped fingernail. Her hair fell over her face, a dull veil that looked fit to crumble like the dead branches outside were crumbling. “You were under no obligation to visit,” she muttered, her courtesy as hollow as the interior of this house, screaming in vain for something to fill its emptiness. “You were under no obligation to make contact with me. I do not see what there is to be sorry about.”

“There was something to be sorry about though, wasn’t there, Anairë?” The natural thing was to call it a retort, but Eärwen was not certain that that fit, for she had never fielded a retort in her mouth that was spoken so softly. “We did not speak to each other for years, and that, I think, is a shame. For we would have had much to speak of, would we not?”

They could have shared their griefs. Something inside of Eärwen ached at the thought of it, the idea of having someone to share all of her grief with. Her parents had been of Endóre once, and they understood the grief of death and separation. Her father even understood it in a similar manner to Eärwen, for his own older brother had been lost in the forests of Beleriand long before Eärwen was born, and Uncle Elmo had stayed behind in Endóre in the hope that perhaps, somehow, Elwë would emerge again from the mists he had vanished into. But her parents did not understand what it was to lose all of their children, and her brothers knew no such grief at all. Even as they had attempted to console her, there had been a distance between her and them that no one had ever been able to bridge—that Eärwen had never even tried to bridge.

And Anairë, Anairë had stayed here alone in this house. Eärwen did not know if any of her Vaniai kin in Valmar had ever tried to visit her here, though given the exceptionally wide berth the Vaniai were giving Tirion these days, she would not be surprised if the answer to that question was a resounding ‘no.’ More likely than not, Anairë had not had any callers among her own kin while Eärwen was away in Alqualondë, and it was possible that Anairë had not even received _letters_ from them—Vaniai visitors to Alqualondë were always hasty to assure the Lindar that they had _nothing_ to do with the Ñoldor these days, many of them refusing even to pass through Tirion on the way to and from Alqualondë, and Eärwen did not know Anairë’s Vaniai kin well enough to know whether they would be willing to risk anyone’s opprobrium to ensure that their half-Ñoldorin kinswoman was doing well.

Eärwen had left her here. Arafinwë had never presumed to force his way into the house, and Eärwen _thought_ she could understand why that was, for a king forcing his way into the house of one of his people did _not_ leave a good taste into the mouths of the rest of his people, but what that meant, above all, was that he had not visited Anairë either, had not monitored her well-being while her kin was away from her, either on the other side of the Sea, or in Valmar, which seemed these days nearly as remote to the Aulendur as did Endóre. There was no evidence that Eärwen could see that so much as _hinted_ towards Anairë’s Vaniai kin deciding to make that remote, potentially scandalous journey from Valmar to Tirion to ensure that Anairë was still well, that she was still living. Anairë’s servants had followed her orders and never stopped to think that perhaps they should intervene—Eärwen would allow that servants were not paid to risk their employer’s wrath by flouting their orders, even if it was for their employer’s own good, but the point stood.

Anairë had been alone. She had been alone with her grief. If there was any way she could, Eärwen would not allow her to stand alone with it any longer. No one should go through their lives with only grief for a companion.

At that, Anairë met her gaze. There was bitterness in her eyes, and the smile that slowly crept over her mouth was so bitter that Eärwen could nearly see the bitterness dripping from the corners of her lips. “I am surprised to hear you say so. Do you think you would have found speaking of such things _pleasant_?”

Eärwen drew a deep breath through her nose, steeling herself for… Well, she could guess. She could guess at the attacks that could be hers to bear. If the moment came that she must bear them, she would steel herself, and weather them without balking. If she had done as she _ought_ to have done, if she had stayed, or if she had at least visited or tried to correspond, the attack still would have come. It would have been earlier, and perhaps in somewhat altered form. Eärwen could never have avoided it. She would accept it.

“It most certainly would _not_ have been pleasant,” Eärwen retorted, folding her arms across her chest, before recognizing the defensive gesture for what it was and forcing her arms back down at her sides. “Certainly not, and you know it. But we could have spoken of it. However painful it would have been, I believe it would have done us both good. It still can,” she went on in a gentler voice. “It still can, if you will let me speak of it with you. Please, Anairë. Have we not both gone on long enough in silence?”

A jittery laugh, jarring as the screech of an angry bird in a previously-silent field, jarred from Anairë’s mouth. “Silent? Oh, yes, it has been silent.” She swallowed thickly on another laugh, casting her gaze around the room as if she expected someone to dissolve out of the shadows. “And it is too quiet to speak of such things here.”

‘Too quiet.’ If anything was to be a tell of Anairë’s heart longing for the past, it was that—nothing could be a greater indication, at least not in Eärwen’s estimation. How often had she visited this house when Anairë’s children, whether still young or past adulthood, were present and were creating any kind of a racket? Countless times. How many times had Eärwen visited Anairë’s house under such circumstances, and found Anairë shut up in this very room, grumbling about the noise and how it distracted her from any and all work she had hoped to do at that time? Countless times. The Anairë Eärwen had known under gold and silver light sometimes sought out public places for her writing—the occasion on which they had met came immediately to mind—but more often than not, she preferred quietude. Anairë had claimed, almost always claimed, that noise while she was trying to work sapped her concentration. _Anything_ she was working at required quiet.

And now, she wanted noise.

It was even more of a tell for the fact that there had been many times, these past many years, when Eärwen had wanted noise, as well. A very specific sort of noise was what she had wanted, what she had desired, what she had longed for so strenuously that she thought it must crack her heart in two down the middle in the longing, and then never found. She had never wanted anything so much as she had wanted that sound—truly, she had often felt as though her heart would crack down the middle for the longing of it.

We could not always have what we wanted, though the wanting felt like something that could kill you if it was never fulfilled. We could not always have what we wanted, but we could speak of it, could we not? We did not have to live silent with our wanting, with our longing, with our cracked hearts and our feelings that we might die for lack of what we so longed for.

Well, Eärwen had not been entirely certain how she was to broach the topic she had come here to broach—to insist upon—but it seemed to her that if she was not to broach it directly, she should not broach it at all. And if this was not the moment, Eärwen did not know what the moment _was_.

“You will find it less totally silent in the palace,” she remarked. “And this house has not been home for you in some time, has it?”

Anairë’s eyes flashed. “This is my _only_ home,” she hissed. “I have known no other since I married. I have never called the palace home; why should I remove to there?”

Only somewhat thickly, “Because I worry for you. Arafinwë worries for you as well, even if he hesitates to express it too strenuously for fear of overpowering you. You have been alone here for so long that there are rumors going through the city that you are dead.”

At that, Anairë scoffed. “I should think my publications would put the lie to that. Please, Eärwen. I know your mind is not dry soil, but I have rarely known you to be so prone to flights of fancy as all that.”

Yes, Anairë’s publications. Eärwen still intended to have a long conversation with her regarding _that_ , not least trying to uncover what exactly had changed so much that Anairë now felt that any writing of hers was ready to be seen by the eyes of others, when she had _never_ before expressed the slightest degree of comfort with the idea of publication. Also, not least regarding the idea that perhaps, whatever discomfort Anairë might have with the state of affairs as they were now, perhaps she should keep from speaking of—or writing of—that discomfort in mixed company when she had yet to draw any supporters to her side. Actually, Anairë should avoid speaking, or writing, of her discomfort with the state of affairs as it currently was in mixed company under _any_ circumstances. That she was married to Fëanáro’s brother presented entirely too close a degree of proximity as to allow her to do such a thing without drawing a great deal of suspicion upon her. If her writings had not already gotten the attention of the Ainur, Eärwen did not think it would take anything much more inflammatory than what she had already written to _get_ their attention.

Later. They could speak of that later. They could speak of that when things were not so rocky, when Anairë’s smile did not look like something that could cut and her hair did not look like something that could crumble and her eyes did not look like things that could fall out of bruised, mottled, rotting eye sockets. They could speak of this when Anairë more resembled herself again. They could speak of this when Anairë did not look up at Eärwen with eyes that both accused and ached.

“And I should think,” Anairë was going on, raising her voice ever so slightly, hardening her voice ever so slightly, “that you and Arafinwë would have rather too much to say to one another to have any time for me.”

If and when Eärwen was ever called to account for her role in the reintegration of Anairë, wife and mother and grandmothers of kings and queens and princes and princesses, into Ñoldorin society, she would not be able to say what did it. If it was Anairë getting to the point, albeit slightly obliquely, or the sullen, almost petulant tone of her voice when she did so, or if it was just that something about the way she spoke put a needle directly to the heart of Eärwen’s own guilt, but whatever it was, it had certainly done the trick.

And it was now that, so overcome that boundaries and stiffening shoulders and panic and rejection were, for good or ill, no longer considerations that even registered in Eärwen’s mind, she closed the gap. Her hands were on Anairë’s shoulders before Anairë could even move. Anairë’s shoulders were even bonier than the obscured sight of them through her dress had indicated, but Eärwen was not thinking about bony shoulders, or bony elbows digging into her sides, or bony knees digging into her calves. She was barely even thinking about a warm, quivering body pressed tightly against hers, layers of cloth grating against skin. She was thinking about presence and closeness and how best to assure Anairë of continued presence and no chance of abandonment while at the same time fearing, like she had feared the choking, crushing darkness that had pinned her to the ground in Valmar, that if she ever let go of Anairë again, Anairë would wink out and disappear from her sight forever, out of reach forever, beyond help.

“Let me go,” but Anairë’s resolve was weakening like sandcastles in the face of the oncoming tide. She did not try to extricate herself from Eärwen’s grip. She did not squirm, or try to step out of Eärwen’s embrace, or push back against her chest. After a long moment, all of the tension dropped out of her limbs like it was a blanket that could just be dropped to the ground.

“Do you think,” Eärwen muttered into her hair, “that my heart is so small that I only have room for commiseration with one other? Do you really think that if you were to come to me and ask for my ear, for my heart, that I would turn you away and leave you with neither? I know it has been many years since we last saw each other, Anairë but—“ a shaky laugh jittered in her mouth, never quite leaving “—it has not been _that_ long, surely.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Anairë’s voice was muffled against the fabric of Eärwen’s dress. “Years and years with no word? People can change in that amount of time.” She shifted her arms, slowly, uncertainly, with the clumsiness of someone who had not moved her arms in such a way for such a purpose in a very long time, so that she could fit them across Eärwen’s broader back and sink her fingernails into cloth. Her fingernails were grown sharp, and their pressure against Eärwen’s skin set off tiny sparks of pain, but Eärwen welcomed that pain if it was accompanied by acceptance. “People can change a _great deal_ in that amount of time.”

Those words were like a knife in Eärwen’s heart, twisting so slowly. She imagined her children, all five of them, wandering the wilderness of Endóre, waging war against the greatest and most terrible of the Valar. If they yet lived, if Eärwen ever saw any of them again, would they be anyone Eärwen could recognize? Would any of Anairë’s children be recognizable to her? Would her granddaughter be recognizable?

It was out of their power, now. All they could do was pick up the pieces here, and maybe make a home their children could return to, if they ever saw them again.

“I won’t lie and say that you find me completely unchanged.” Eärwen smiled tightly, blinking tears out of her eyes. “There has been much to change me, since last we spoke. But I hope that in the time to come, you will find much to recognize. Come with me, Anairë. This house is nothing but a tomb.”

For a long moment, there was silence, no response, and fear dragged its claws down Eärwen’s chest, whispering to her that Anairë would refuse, that Anairë would shake her off and go back to her desk and send her away, that Anairë would slip out of her arms and disappear completely. And Anairë never answered her in _words_ , exactly. But her hair caught on the pearls sewn to the front of Eärwen’s dress as she nodded her head. It was a message Eärwen could understand.

**Author's Note:**

>  _A Conceit_ , by Maya Angelou
> 
> Give me your hand  
> Make room for me  
> to lead and follow  
> you  
> beyond this rage of poetry.  
> Let others have  
> the privacy of  
> touching words  
> and love of loss  
> of love.  
> For me  
> Give me your hand.
> 
>  **Aikanáro** —Aegnor  
>  **Angaráto** —Angrod  
>  **Arafinwë** —Finarfin  
>  **Arakáno** —Argon  
>  **Artanis** —Galadriel  
>  **Artaresto** —Orodreth   
> **Findaráto** —Finrod  
>  **Findekáno** —Fingon  
>  **Fëanáro** —Fëanor   
> **Írissë** —Aredhel  
>  **Moringotto** —Morgoth  
>  **Ñolofinwë** —Fingolfin  
>  **Turukáno** —Turgon
> 
>  **Anar** —The Sun (Quenya); called ‘Anar the Fire-Golden’ in a name originally given to it by the Vanyar, but eventually came into use by the rest of the Amanyar as well. Of the Sun and the Moon, it is the younger of the two vessels, lit by Laurelin’s last fruit  
>  **Aulendur** —the name used first for those Ñoldor in the service of Aulë; later used for all those Ñoldor who did not involve themselves in the Rebellion and stayed in Aman. The term was used to differentiate themselves from the Exiles.  
>  **Calaquendi** —“Elves of the Light”; the Elves who came to Aman from Cuiviénen, or were born there, especially those born during the Years of the Trees and had born witness to their light; the Vanyar, the Ñoldor, and the Falmari (singular: Calaquendë) (Quenya)  
>  **Culúrien** —an alternate name for Laurelin, the younger of the Two Trees of Valinor.  
>  **Ellalië** —the Telerin form of 'Eldalië'; 'the Elven-Folk', usually a term used to refer to all of the Elves, though generally someone speaking of the Eldalië is not referring to the Avari.  
>  **Endóre** —Middle-Earth (Quenya)  
>  **Falmari** —those among the Teleri who completed the journey to Aman; the name is derived from the Quenya falma, '[crested] wave.'  
>  **Isil** —the name given to the Moon in Aman; it was originally called ‘Isil the Sheen’ by the Vanyar, a name which was eventually adopted by the Ñoldor and the Teleri of Aman as ‘Isil’; of the Sun and the Moon, it is the elder of the two vessels, lit by Telperion’s last flower; in an early version of ‘Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor’ was said to be “the giver of visions” ( _The Lost Road_ 264).  
>  **Lindar** —‘Singers’; the clan name the Nelyar gave themselves (rendered in Telerin as ‘Lindai’; rendered in Primitive Quendian as ‘lindā’ or ‘glindā, though the latter appears only in Sindarin), for it was said that they learned to sing before they learned to speak. The Lindar (later known to outsiders as the Teleri) split into several groups: the Falmari of Aman, the Sindar, and the Nandor (which itself encompasses the Laiquendi and the Silvan-folk).  
>  **Ninquelótë** —‘White Blossom’ (Quenya); one of the many names given to Telperion. It is likely that this name was widely used among the Teleri of Aman, considering that the Númenóreans received their white tree, Nimloth, from the Elves of Tol Eressëa, and Nimloth is the Sindarin equivalent of the Quenya ‘Ninquelótë.’  
>  **Vaniai** —the Telerin Quenya equivalent of 'Vanyar'


End file.
